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PROCESSIONALS 



By 

JOHN CURTIS UNDERWOOD 



^For the mind of man is marching past 
■perdition through the night" 



MITCHELL KENNERLEY 
NEW YORK:: MCMXV 



COPYRIGHT, 191 5, BY 
MITCHELL KENNERLEY 









MAY -I !9I5 



PRINTED BY VAIL-BALLOU COMPANY 
BINGHAMTON, NEW YORK 



CU;i!)782 5 



IN MEMORIAM 
LOUIS POTTER 
OBIT MCMXII 



FOREWORD 

Leading the long procession through the midnight, 
Man that was ether, fire, sea, germ and ape, 
Out of the aeons blind of slime emerging. 
Out of the aeons black when will went groping. 
Finding the fire, was fused to human shape. 

Heading the dreary marches through dark ages; 
Where the rest perished that the rest might be, 
Out of the aeons raw and red of bloodshed, 
Man that was caveman, found the stars. Forever 
Man to the stars goes marching from the sea. 

Man that was caveman mounts, and makes, and measures. 

Atoms and oceans rules. And to his will 

Storms and the stars pay tribute. All we bring thee, 

To thy last altar Life, today. Adoring 

To our last breath we lift our living still. 

All that we learned and loved we bring and bless thee; 
All of our toils and tears to pay thy price. 
All of our sins and shames are thine. Forever 
Man that was slave goes marching forth to freedom. 
Till his last triumph turns to sacrifice. 

Peconic, g-2^-14 



CONTENTS 



COSMICS 



LES FORTS 

THE WEAK 

ARCHANGELS 

THE SUMMIT 

OLYMPIADE 

REVENANTS 

ADVENTURERS 

SAILORS 

SOLDIERS 

PRIESTS 



MODERNS 



A PORTRAIT 

THE TEST TUBE 

THE NEW STAR 

SCIENCE AND THE EDITOR 

BURNT SACRIFICE 

THE BRIDGE BUILDER 

CONGRESS CONVENES 

COMMENCEMENT 



PAGE 

3 
6 

9 

12 

15 
i8 

20 
23 
25 

28 

33 
35 
37 
40 

43 
44 
47 
49 



CONTENTS 



THE POLICE MAGISTRATE 
THE PUBLIC LIBRARY 



WOMEN 



HELEN 

MANNEQUINS 

THE HANDMAID 

LA GITANA 

ANNUNCIATION 

A WOMAN 

BEDTIME 

THE OLD MOTHER 

HER BIRTHDAY 

EVE 



ARTS 



THE LEADER 

THE RECITAL 

THE DEAD SCULPTOR 

THE SECRET 

THE TOUCHSTONE 

THE SICK EDITOR 

ART IN THE SLUMS 

THE CURATOR 

PICTURES FOR MEN 

TRUTH 

REGIONAL 

LITTLE BRIDES OF MARY 



PAGE 

55 



59 
61 

63 
64 
67 
68 

71 
72 

74 
76 

81 
84 
87 
89 
91 
93 
96 
98 

lOI 

104 
109 



CONTENTS 





PAGE 


THE HOST IN THE HILLS 


III 


KARMA 


114 


BISKRA 


116 


COVENT GARDEN 


119 


THE SALESMAN 


121 


NATURE AND THE PIT 


123 


APRIL IN THE LUXEMBOURG 


125 


SOLDIERS OF LIFE 


127 


EMIGRANTS 


130 


THE OPEN QUESTION 




THE OPEN QUESTION 


135 


SURVIVAL 


137 


HEART OF FIRE 


140 


THE LAST VISTA 


143 


SANCTUARY 


144 


MARKING TIME 


146 


THE SOUL HUNTER 


149 


TOMORROW^ 


152 


PRACTICAL PEOPLE 


154 


TOYLAND 


157 


PAIN 




THE CANCER WARD 


161 


CHRIST IN THE ASYLUM 


164 


MILL CHILDREN 


166 


GUTTER SLIME 


168 


CAMP FOLLOVV^ERS 


170 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

THE BREAD LINE i73 

THE LOCK-STEP 176 

IN HOSPITAL 179 

THE OLD 181 

BLIND 184 

PEOPLE 

COMMUTERS 189 

NINE O'CLOCK 192 

THE WIRETAPPER 194 

THE AIRMAN 196 

THE SIGNAL TOWER 199 

THE CONSTRUCTION GANG 202 

THE LINESMAN 204 

THE ACCOUNTANT 207 

MOVIES 210 

THE PIT 213 

MOODS 

KINSHIP AT DAVOS 219 

A REST 221 

FLOOD TIDE 223 

PLEIN AIR 225 

SATURDAY'S TRAIN 227 

WELCOME 230 

CHILDREN 232 

BED RIDDEN 235 

PLAY RITUAL 237 

MACHINE MADE 240 



CONTENTS 
THINGS 

PAGE 

THE EARTH MAN ^ 245 

AURORA 247 

THE GOLDEN GIRL 249 

THE GARGOYLES 251 

THE STONE PILE 254 

FLEET MANCEUVRES 256 

GLOUCESTER SCHOONERS 259 

THE ROAD 261 

THE OVERLAND TRAIL 265 

THE OLD HOUSE 269 

ENVOY 272 



COSMICS 



LES FORTS 

WE were spawned in lava mountains. From the surf 
line of the sea, 
We were cast on desert islands when the world began to 

be. 
Rocks were hard to make us harder. Storms were strong 

to make us strong. 
And our will was set and tempered where the frosts 
were sore and long. 



Glaciers drove us. We retreated till we overtopped the 

snow. 
Past the passes pierced the mountains: found the valleys 

warm below. 
We went marching past perdition w^ith a purpose ill 

conceived 
Till we made us gods of granite, and a Law that we 

believed. 

Then we made us camps and cities, for our cattle, for 

our wives. 
And we found us gold and silver, and we purchased 

power with lives. 
And w^e made us ships and seamen. Master craftsmen 

we became. 
And we wrought us arts and letters; blew a bubble that 

was fame. 

3 



4 LES FORTS 

And our strength became our weakness. We were wasted 

In the night. 
And we lost the stars in lewdness that blasphemed all 

law and light. 
And we bred us filth and fevers till our children were 

as slaves 
In the streets of dying cities, and our gods we laid in 

graves. 

Still we lusted for the open, for the sea, and for the 

sun. 
There we marveled at the mountains and the deeds that 

men have done. 
There we sought a Voice, a Vision; till our doctors of 

disease 
Out of travail pangs of ages brought to birth a • Soul 

that sees: 



Made a mind that masters slowly want and weakness, 
storm and time: 

Wrests her secrets from the midnight; fills all space with 
rythm and rhyme: 

Tears the rotting veils of vision from its Truth it dares 
to face : 

Sees in man his own salvation, finds in fear its last dis- 
grace : 



LES FORTS 5 

Binds new burdens on the strong, and sets them sterner 

handicaps; 
Spends their strength in ceaseless striving till they meet 

the great Perhaps; 
Lends itself to lift the fallen in its last crusade of light. 
For the mind of man is marching past perdition through 

the night. 

Marseilles, ^-21-14 



THE WEAK 

WE were born of night and terror in a wilderness of 
fear. 
We were made to be your burdens till your tyrants 

disappear. 
Hatred, greed, despair, for ages were our grandams and 

our sires: 
We were mangled in the mountains, ringed around with 
frosts and fires. 



Starving men begat in horror our forerunners weak as 

we. 
Sickly mothers gave us suck. We lost our brothers in 

the sea. 
We were seized and we were shaken by a million mouths 

of pain. 
We were trapped and we were taken, and in torment we 

were slain. 



We were slaves to lusts that slew us slowly. We were 

slaves to toil. 
Chain gangs marched across the meadows. Rotting figs 

and rancid oil 
Were our rations. We went naked in the galleys, in 

the sun. 
We were slaves to lies that slew us slowly, surely, one 

by one. 

6 



THE WEAK 7 

Slaves to gods debased, like devils in our masters' coward 

minds ; 
Old traditions, superstitions, idols born of prayer that 

blinds ; 
Creeds as cruel as their quenchless hell; the scapegoats of 

their sins. 
Making of its fears a fetish, slowly life to freedom wins. 

We are slaves that snap their fetters, one by one, and 

year by year. 
We come stumbling from our dungeons till the sun and 

stars appear. 
Weary, wounded, falling, dying, in your streets of lies 

obscene, 
We go groping through the shadows to a land where 

life is clean. 

Little children in your mills, and babies butchered in 

your streets. 
Men in mines you doom to darkness; women, life's last 

vile defeats. 
Lawyers, liars, scribes and teachers who a nation's soul 

betray ; 
Perjured priests and healers, slowly stumbling toward the 

light of day. 



8 THE WEAK 

So we have defiled for ages out of darkness. Now we 

see 
New salvation made for millions, nearer. So our thoughts 

go free. 
Year by year you cure our bodies; teach our rotting souls 

to know 
Will, that mind shall make immortal, life's last fear shall 

overthrow. 
We were weak to make you stronger. Like your children 

we shall grow. 

Peconic, j-ji-14 



B 



ARCHANGELS 

Y the bones that fell before them they were blooded 

to the trail, 
By the ghosts that dared the desert, dying they have 

grasped the grail. 
Like the substance lost of corals slowly risen from the 

sea, 
By the faith that failed and faltered we were fitted to 

be free. 



By a star that's dead two thousand year, you steer across 

the night. 
By the force of fallen waters I am switching on the 

light 
In my study that's a temple and a treasure house of 

souls, 
Where the strongest still are silent in the shadows of 

their goals. 
Standing armies, rank on rank of truth eternal. Round 

the walls, 
Round the shelves a light unearthly, spraj^ed like radium, 

lifts and falls. 

There they stand in silent test tubes charged with 

chemicals of thought. 
Elements of life, its cultures, oiit of chaos slowly wrought. 
Force that's free from flesh forever, cells of one immortal 

Mind; 

9 



lo ARCHANGELS 

Man that forth from night and ether, word by word his 
faith defined. 

Word by word — the apes have chattered — word by word 

of fraud and fear, 
From the shamans, from the sibyls, from the priests we 

had to hear. 
Year by year we broke their idols, broke their shackles, 

fought the shades; 
Fought with beasts in light's arena, every lie that life 

degrades. 
Blow by blow we rent the barriers, step by step more near 

we trod 
To the threshold of tomorrow and the secrets gray of 

God. 

Word by word we wrote our gospels, line by line our 

letters set. 
Lost illusions, loves and lustings, forced the feeble to 

forget : 
Found a force that growing stronger still than atom, germ 

or star; 
Cringing once in shame to shadows, stands that truth 

whose thoughts we are. 

Here its shrine and here its powerhouse waits till all our 
lines are laid, 



ARCHANGELS ii 

Dynamos and coils connected, through a world that sick, 

afraid, 
Shaken with the crash of churches, dumb with anguish 

longs to see 
Sunlight in its shameful places. Here our surgeons set 

you free, 
Snap your shackles. Thought forever and the work of 

thought alone, 
Earth outliving, serve the Highest; soar adoring round 

the throne. 

S.S. Chicago, 4-16-13 



THE SUMMIT 

WE went climbing in the morning from the valleys, 
from the cities black of men. 
Something called us to the sky line, for the sky larks 

soared, the light was lifting then. 
We went climbing in the sunshine. We went singing. 

We went rivaling the sun. 
But our singing ceased, our throats were choked, our 
breath was battling long before the day was done. 

We went climbing from the shore line, from the shallows, 

the unsounded depths of sea, 
Where the corals, the crustaceans, the sea lizards, all our 

crawling life began to be. 
We went climbing through the shadows, through the 

jungles, where the tiger and the ape 
Lurked and lingered, watched and hungered, crawling, 

crouching, lest our stragglers should escape. 
We went climbing past the caves where first our fathers 

lit their fire. 
Fallen embers from their altars, hopeless hungers, flaming 

horrors, nursed the flame of our desire. 

We went climbing toward the snow peaks, toward the 
limits, toward the light beyond the snow; 

Beacons quenched and ruined watch towers labored past. 
At last we turned to watch the world below 

12 



THE SUMMIT 13 

Where a cross stood sagging, slanting, slowly sinking by 

a bare deserted shrine. 
Close beside the open adit, like a hungry mouth of nothing 

of an old abandoned mine. 



We went climbing past the past that time has gutted, 

ending empty works and hollow creeds. 
We went climbing towards tomorrow, towards the truth 

that out of sorrow shapes our human, our immortal 

needs. 
One by one my brothers staggered, fell and lay; and 

dying drove us on before. 
Last my love and I alone were left till day grew grey, and 

tricked and tripped us more and more; 
Marred her face, her brave eyes hid. At last I lost her 

where a swirl of mist 
Mocked my eyes, my cries. But something pulsed within 

me, crept behind me, forced and flogged me to 

persist. 

Something cried " She may be strong and true, and 

stronger, truer too than you. 
You may meet her at the summit when the sunlight lights 

the falling fires of life that flame anew." 
We went climbing through the blackness until memory 

merged in pain that senseless struggle flayed away. 



14 THE SUMMIT 

Climbing, clutching, creeping, kneeling; fainting, falling, 
rising, reeling ; with the weight of night I wrestled. 
Suddenly I won today. 

So despair I passed at last. Alone I scaled the summit: 

saw the dawn; 
Higher snow peaks, wider ranges, like the lines of God's 

gray gospel, like His secret thoughts withdrawn; 
Wrote my word in straggling letters ; piled my cairn with 

fingers numb; 
Watched the myriad marching banners of the sunrise up- 
ward come ; 
Gathered breath and tightened belt, and turned towards 

endless stairs of stone. 
Flaming up to Life's last summit, where the souls that live 

to struggle, where the strong in desolation, trace 

slow trails of truth alone. 

New York, 1-6-13 



OLYMPIADE 

WE who are sons of the North, of the hills, of the 
woods, of the sea. 
Sons of the men that our earth has sent forth, Its makers 

and masters to be; 
This is our song, and the stress of our brain, the beat of 

our heart and the tread of our feet; 
That is wrought into triumph through toil and through 
pain, and the will that is steel when the mighty 
shall meet. 

Now the runners are poised. They are tense on their 
m.ark, like an orchestra tuning its strings; 

Till a pistol's report, like a spark in the dark, has spurred 
them and shod them with wings. 

And each movement Is music, each stride is a rhyme and 
a rhythm. And the beat and the scrape 

Of the feet on the track are like currents that chafe 
round the bends In their banks. Like a cape 

That is girdled by surf, the last corner Is turned. Like 
the race and the rush of the tides 

They break down the home stretch. The runner Isi breast- 
ing the tape. And his soul In his strides 

Sings the song of the blood, of the breath, of the brain, 
of the bones and the sinews and thews ; 

The song of the strong, of the fullness of life that Its 
forces must master and use; 



15 



i6 OLYMPIADE 

The song of the strength and the sleight of the hand, and 
the muscles like fighting men trained, 

That advance and retreat as the will gives the vs^ord, till 
the battle is draw^n or is gained. 



And the strong men advance to their trial. They are 

shrewd with their grapples and weights. 
And the wrestlers lie locked. They draw breath for 

a while. And the primitive terrors and hates 
Of the cave man who first cast a stone at despair, are 

this shot putter's sudden reserves. 
Like the head of a lance, like the fang of a snake, as he 

summons his sinews and nerves 
For one moment, one task, he is man; he is more; he Is 

all that creation has won 
Out of the chaos and night; one more lunge to the light; 

one more stride toward the stars and the sun. 

This Is the song of the blood, of the sire, of the son, of 

the sister, the mother, the wife ; 
All that flow by our sides like a river In flood, through 

the veins of a race that life strains out of strife. 
This is the song of the breed, of the lean Viking sea 

wolves by land and by sea, 
That ran round the world till they trained to succeed; 

that can master tomorrow and all that shall be. 



OLYMPIADE 17 

And their footfalls are singing, their runnings are runes. 

And they run as the waves and the rivers must 

run; 
Like the wind and the rain and the throbbing of pain, 

like the winging of birds, like the light of the sun. 

And like rest after struggle, like sleep in the night; in 
the lull of the shouting, the pause of the song. 

Comes a moment immortal of love and delight in the 
souls of the thousands that echo the strong. 

Though the breath of the runner may falter and fail to- 
morrow, he lives to his limit today ; 

One note, and one word, and one stride on the trail of 
the race that must run till the stars shall decay. 

StockJiolnij '/-ig-12 



REFENANTS 

THERE is a day of all the saints, and then 
A day of all the souls of God on earth, 
All the faint forms wherein He found himself 
Fulfilled ; or failed. The last warm wistful days, 
Drifting with haze and haloed with faint sunlight 
Summon them back to warm themselves and live. 

The year's last harvest has been set aside. 
Men gather its last gleamings. So they come 
To gleam behind us saving shreds of pity, 
And golden seeds of sorrows still unsuffered. 

We may remember them when autumn drives 
The leaves before him. They are frailer still. 
More than the leaves, innumerable, wan. 
Faint as the smoke of autumn fires that mounts 
To meet the haze, and dies before the daylight. 

These are the golden days of memory. 
The whole world makes its own before it buries 
The dying year in winter's drifted marble ; 
Days when they most have power to live in us. 

Endless processions passing from the past. 
Souls of strong sins and stronger loves and sorrows, 
Men whose hands made us; mothers of our mothers. 
Seen in our children's lips and eyes one second. 

i8 



REV EN J NTS 19 

This is their season, they who in our blood 
Clamor each hour; who knock at dead of night 
At our hard hearts; whose dead hands slay or save 
When we remember most, and most we need them. 

Then the w^arm world for winter's storms prepares; 
Till, like the drifting leaves, at last they vanish. 

Peconic, 6-1-14 



ADVENTURERS \ 

ONCE we walked the windlass round, stamping to j 

the chantey's sound; sang to start her. \ 

Once we threw our dice with death; shifting ballast, \ 

trembling breath, strove to barter. | 

Burning mountains, islands far, where the trade wind's 

courses are, then we sighted: i 

Cities sacked and set afire. Lives we lost for love or 
hire. We have lighted 

Beacons bright in boyhood's eyes. Treasons shrewd with 

shrewder lies we requited. ^ 

Continents whose nerves were night, trail by trail we \ 

dragged to light. All we charted, \ 

Till today from pole to pole we have run and grasped \ 

our goal, restless hearted. i 

I 

What tomorrow shall we do, what assail and what pursue, 

where adventure? i 

All your life's a ledger page. And your earth is gray with | 
age. Law's indenture 

Makes your days the days of slaves. And your fathers 
from their graves their sons censure. 

.i 

When we force your last frontier, when our hearts for- 
getting fear, tame and cruel J 



ADVENTURERS 21 

Grow as your sick souls have grown: how shall life win 
back its own, find new fuel? 

To the jungle said the farm, '' When your power to spoil 

and harm, all is ended; 
How shall I my limits know, where begin and cease to 

grow." Time defended 
Silently the jungle smiled, like a savage or a child, wild 

and splendid. 

This was so ere Rome was old. Before Babylon grew 

cold, men were asking 
** Must we pay this price of peace? Shall, untried, our 

valor cease, legion-tasking? " 

Your barbarians begin, hordes without you and within, 

to beleaguer 
Every city you have built out of greed and blood and 

guilt. Bodies meager, 
Spirits weak as women fail. Life is tireless. Life is 

male. Life is eager. 

Clouds of gnats and airships soar, dive to death : but more 

and more life arises. 
Through the ether science-mined, lens and rays new 

marvels find, new surmises. 



22 ADVENTURERS 

Life lines up your last reserves. Where the jungle in 

your nerves life is wasting. 
Where your sons degenerate clots of greed disintegrate, 

death foretasting; 
Every savage in the slum is a pledge of life to come, 

full, unhasting. 

War its thunder nearer rolls, soon to search and sift 

your souls. You who tame her 
Starve and make of peace a whore, where your millions 

men adore, stain and shame her. 

War is worship for the free. Since man first began to 
be, our endeavor. 

Legionaries, errant knights, pioneers, life's acolytes: rest- 
ing never. 

Seeking out its God unknown, till the last man dies alone ; 
lives forever. 

Los Angeles, 10-20-13 



SAILORS 

OUT of the deep the waves rise up to praise Thee. 
Day after day the tides in high procession 
Singing their songs of praise, make earth an altar 
Under Thy boundless temple dome of sky. 
Year after year their multitudes adored Thee, 
Millions of lives obscured that lived to die. 

Nations of men innumerable served Thee; 
Out of their weakness wrought Thy ships and sailors; 
Out of their blindness found Thy farthest islands; 
Charted Thy coasts and foundered in Thy storms. 
Millions of ships they wrecked in mist and midnight. 
Out of Thy fogs a planet's vision forms. 

Now we have seen Thy breakers by Thy searchlights; 
Pricked on Thy maps Thy poles in due position ; 
Now we precisely make our weekly landfalls. 
Along Thy sea lanes steadily there go 
Thousands of ships In endless, swift procession; 
Bearing Thy burdens. Master, to and fro. 

We are Thy priests, O Lord. The rest forgetful 
Doze on Thy decks, and count their gains and losses. 
We are Thy priests. Thy spirit shares our watches 
Where in the fog Thy bergs are loosed to slay: 
Where In the night Thy rocks reach up to rend us. 
We are Thy priests O Lord, by night and day. 



24 SAILORS 

We are Thy priests. We lead Thy people onward. 
Pluck them from listless cares to watch Thy wonders, 
Teach them to hear Thy voice in calms and thunders. 
Wave after wave we lift Thy host on high. 
We are Thy celebrants of stars and whirlwinds, 
Turned to Thy altar lights to see Thy sky. 

Pe conic, 6-3-14 



SOLDIERS 

ONCE we fought on with fear and night with broken 
flints and boughs of trees. 
We forged us blades and shafts of light. With fire we 

slew our enemies. 
We led ten thousand men to fight where once we marched 
by twos and threes. 



Chieftains and kings we swept away. We brought our 

bleeding captives home, 
And gold and women. Yesterday our triumphs crowned 

the hills of Rome. 
Altars and arch in ruins lay, and time defiled each temple 

dome. 

Still we went marching on. We stood the sentinels of 

progress there 
On Nubian sands, in Dacian wood. When Rome brought 

home her last despair 
To meet the Hun's red brotherhood, we made our end 

an iron prayer. 

W"e made our discipline a law for later legions, pioneered 
New empires that the Spaniards saw, guarded his gods. 

Westward we steered. 
Felt English canvas slat and draw, till time's new world 

to truth appeared. 

25 



26 SOLDIERS 

We made New England. Born to be her Pilgrim spirits, 

ironsides 
Stern as her winters and her sea, we wrestled with her 

storms and tides. 
We took her forest, tree by tree, from death that in the 

darkness hides. 

We slew her savages. We went across the mountains 

and the plains, 
Marched on and made a continent for all the world : from 

our red veins 
Baptized your states. Our strength we spent to found 

this nation that remains. 

We freed the slave. Of death we made a sacrament, a 

brotherhood. 
Into his incense black and frayed the battle flags reeled 

on and stood ; 
Till our last dead to rest were laid before his altar. Hill 

and wood 

Still trenched and scarred, where spring is green, bear 

witness to our iron rites. 
We raised a temple vast, unseen. And there our brothers 

walk at night, 
And see the shames that crawl between their monuments. 

From starry heights 



SOLDIERS 27 

They wait to watch their nation wake when God's red 

Sabbath comes again, 
When one by one His soldiers take His altar steps through 

iron rain; 
When women's hearts their martyrs make of freemen 

fallen not in vain. 

Your editors, with liar's souls blaspheme our service. 

Blind and slow 
Your Congress thins our muster rolls. Your aliens snarl. 

By this we know 
That Death shall take his double tolls when forth to God 

our banners go. 

Peconic, 6-4—14 



w 



PRIESTS 



E waved torches In the night, we dealt in spells. 
We traded fear. 
We raised ghosts. We wrought with wizards, making 

portents black appear. 
We made lies and murder serve us, stealing power from 
far and near. 



Others bowed to Bacchus blindly. We their drunken 

madness led. 
Others gave their babes to Moloch; for our good they 

burned and bled. 
Others virgins to Astarte brought, to us, who never wed. 

We grew great by hoarding secrets, shared by us of earth 
and skies, 

Secrets of the hoards of others, secrets wrung from rest- 
less eyes. 

Secret shames, sick fears of mothers. In all wickedness 
made wise 

We grew rich ; but man grew strong. The wide black 

spider web of night 
Strand by strand in silence burning ; fire by fire, he fought 

to light. 
So we made us gods that left him damned forever in 

God's sight. 

28 



PRIESTS 29 

lie grew greater. He grew tender, till a mother and a 

child 
Born to bless, he dreamed. And we betrayed his hopes, 

and love that smiled, 
Fearing hell that flamed forever; failed and died by us 

defiled. 

We set shackles on men's spirits. We weighed down their 

hearts with dread. 
Burned stray bodies at the stake, set thumb screws round 

man's fingers red. 
And with crippled fingers groping, man went marching on 

ahead. 

We forbade his mind to mount where we had taught his 

soul to crawl. 
Man that breaks his idols slowly, past each crumbling 

temple wall 
Looked beyond us to the stars, and found in slime new 

life for all. 

Whether Christ is better shrined in Rome or Moscow, 

now no more 
Rends men's lives. And men today a God of larger life 

adore. 
Life that batters down Its idols, they must build and 

battle for. 



'30 PRIESTS 

We are failing, we are falling, we that preach a god of 

lies. 
To the women, to the children, to the blind. In darkness 

dies 
Our dominion of the shadows, every shame that light 

denies. 

Now the world outgrowing fear no more can worship 

yesterday. 
Now it needs no more our creeds, nor prays as children 

blindly pray. 
Like all life extinct Thy martyrs are. Lord, we shall 

be as they. 

Peconic, 8-21-13 



MODERNS 



A PORTRAIT 

DR. ALEXIS CARREL 

THE eyes behind the glasses look at you, 
They probe your flesh. They pierce your spirit 
through. 
You stand before a Jesuit In white, 
A new high priest of life's last order — Light. 

Since out of darkness came the will to be, 
The soul to suffer and the mind to see; 
Since life's long ladder leads us to today; 
Since ages lapse and nations pass away; 
Since from its ashes life renews its flame; 
Out of an ape's misshapen brain he came. 

He comes today to make the crooked straight, 
Out of a wilderness of lust and hate. 
He comes to heal the halt. The dumb shall speak. 
The blind shall see what still they dumbly seek. 

Man has all power. He holds the beating heart 
Torn from the breast. He takes the flesh apart 
To save the soul that tortured still survives. 
He works his miracles on modern lives. 
And out of pain, disease, despair, decay; 
He raises life and levers death away. 



34 A PORTRAIT 

His scapels harrow highways hard of One 
Who waits till his forerunner's task is done. 
His brain records, his lenses life dissect, 
Till men a stronger Saviour still expect. 

For not to end in darkness evermore. 

Men rise from night and dreams of light adore. 

Today our surgeons triumph over pain. 

We shall see stronger surgeons of the brain, 

Surgeons of doubt, defeat; at last a Goal 

Won from this wilderness that wastes the soul. 

New York, 1-1-13 



THE TEST TUBE 

HERE is chaos swiftly whirling where a Bunsen 
burner's flame 
Sets a million atoms swirling, atoms that from ether came ; 
Flame from sunlight man-sublimed that I might give 
my germ a name. 

Here my culture lives and spreads, and growing faster 

day by day, 
Drives one dread of all man's dreads of death and night 

and cold away, 
Till an antitoxin new once more rekindles mortal clay. 

Here creation in this glass the aeons and the centuries 
In due season bring to pass perfectly. And such as these 
Fumes that swirl around each planet newly born, the 
Master sees. 

Once we fought with shapes of fear and life was frozen 

in the night. 
Till an ape that seared his hand, clutched a brand and 

clung to light. 
Once we dreamed that love alone, evil's essence could set 

right. 

Good and evil, twin, entwined, in this glass our lenses 
show ; 

35 



36 THE TEST TUBE 

Seeds of death by man refined to cure, not kill, at last 

we know. 
All processionals of atoms through the ages come and 
go: 

Through the ether, through the midnight, through the 

earth, through children pale, 
Warped and wasted in our slums till all creation seems to 

fail: 
Till their prayers, their sighs unheard, avail to make this 

glass a grail, 

Denver, 10-13-13 



THE NEW STAR 

WE hold the upper places fast. On many a mountain 
height 
Our watch towers stand. We map the stars, we chart 

the curves of light 
Like men who saw o'er Bethlehem a new star in the 
night. 



We wander through the infinite, the wilderness of space, 
To worship Truth revealed to man, a spectrum new to 

trace. 
To find some planet fresh prepared to be Love's dwelling 

place. 

This world is old and full of sin and sickness, sure to 

die. 
It serves its purpose and it ends, the same as you and 

I, 

We are your Prophets who translate the gospel of the 
sky. 

Here on our conning tower of time, our turret of today. 
Searchlight and gun, artillery of truth, we serve and 

sway. 
We shell the midnight with men's minds till legions black 

give way. 



37 



38 THE NEW STAR 

For men of old steered by the stars o'er land and shore- 
less sea, 

And coast by coast their earth explored. And so today 
do we, 

Who sound the eddies of the skies till flesh and soul sail 
free. 

When coracles to gallej^s grew by Sidon and by Tyre; 
Our fathers pricked their parchment charts, they nursed 

a smothered fire, 
They lit their spirits at the stars, to struggle, starve, 

aspire. 

And not aloof and lone we are, nor far divorced as they 
From all that live upon the land, that walk the human 

way, 
Who struggle, strive and stumble on, who all one law 

obey. 

We are your eyes but we have ears for human joy and 

pain. 
When surgeons like creators carve from chaos life again. 
When some new poet like a star appears, we too attain. 

We watch the faces of our wives new lit v/hile we dissect 
Both light and night, the very void, and life's last nerve 
detect. 



THE NEW STAR 39 

And while our children smile we probe the love of God's 
elect. 

We measure life, but more w^e live, we feel the rising 

tide, 
The Brute that out of blackness born, that scarred and 

crucified, 
Sees star by star the Grail supreme that death shall fail 

to hide. 

New York, 12-24-12 



SCIENCE AND THE EDITOR 

MEN should envy me you say for all I know and try 
to do: 
Test tubes, cultures, truth dissected. Well I wish that I 

were you 
With your fountain pen that probes, your hyperdermics, 

truth and lies; 
Subtle drugs that cure or kill the will, the mind, that you 

devise 
In this cosmic laboratory of the city that you daily rush 

and crush and stumble through. 



So you've heard this mongrel yelping. He was happy for 

a day. 
First we fed his puppy's paunch. Then Otto taught him 

how to play. 
Vivisected, racked to marrow, matter red disintegrates. 
But his heart inside a jar beats, and time's tenth hour 

awaits 
Ticking off the vital seconds until fools forget their folly, 

glimpse our goal that's stars away. 

Better dogs like life itself run like brooks, like sunbeams 
breed. 

Here this heart upon the shelf helps all manhood to suc- 
ceed. 

Anti-vivisection slush still you publish when it pays. 

40 



SCIENCE AND THE EDITOR 41 

Fools will gush and weakness whimpers. Half your tribe 
the truth dismays. 

Human mongrels in perdition, souls by Wall Street vivi- 
sected, out of blindness man must lead. 

Redlight hearts in dingy jars, fingers grafted from a child 

To the race that clutches stars, by your cotton mills de- 
filed; 

All the raw tormented truth that you trade in; spirits 
bowed ; 

All the dreams profaned of youth your six inch headlines 
shriek aloud ; 

Fumes of heaven and hell together are in time's long 
laboratory, sublimated, reconciled. 

Test tubes, cultures, here are clean, deadly microbes though 

we brew. 
Yours are clouded and obscene. Antiseptics science knew 
Only yesterday, remember. Vice you've yet to segregate. 
Yes, and Greed : but little children from the tenements of 

hate. 
Can't we take from Satan's test tubes, rear in cultures 

clear as crystal, somehow, sometime, I and you ? 

Here's the section of an eye, the rest I grafted — cataract 
Cured completely. Millions die to leave one tiny lens in- 
tact. 



42 SCIENCE AND THE EDITOR 

Graft the truth, man, fix and free it, clean and clear for 

minds that blink. 
Though you die the race shall see it, see with thoughts 

you dared to think. 
Maybe in his endless purpose, God shall save you from 

extinction, graft the slice of soul you lacked. 

Neiv York, 12-12-12 



BURNT SACRIFICE 

GOD poured a beaker of His wrath today 
Into this casting pit, on human clay 
Lost in the flood of molten steel that leapt 
Out of the crucible. Two women wept, 
Their children wailed. And still these iron pulses beat 
Where hell's blast furnaces a nation's life blood heat. 

Two men were blotted out. Their funeral 
No mourners throng. No mother may recall 
How her son lay in death and smiled at her, 
Or tend his grave. Yet were they happier 
Than millions crushed to slime by man's obscene machine, 
Their lives were gray with grirrie. The death they died 
was clean. 

For these lost soldiers on life's firing line 

We have no tears ; a cautery divine 

Seared them away to cleanse our discontent. 

Some mighty bridge may be their monument. 

In death they live. But we, slavish and tyrannous. 

How shall our souls go free? How shall it profit us? 

New York, 10-14-12 



43 



o 



THE BRIDGE BUILDER 



NCE the powers that planned the oceans left an 
island near the shore 
In the angle vast, reentrant, reaching down from Labra- 
dor, 
At the West's great Watergate. And there Manhattan 

came to be, 
In the purpose plotting surely life for all on land and sea. 



Life was shipped from overseas, and there remained. Two 

cities there 
Reaching out struck hands together, held them clasped. 

They sent me where 
I went sinking caissons slowly, eighty feet below the day. 
Through the quicksand driving wedges, till my towers 

were under way. 

Once they built a tower at Babel. Babels twain I rose 

between, 
Tuned my cables, tightened trusses, till my symphony was 

seen. 
Strong, enduring, flawless, finished. Where the cities' 

noise grows still 
In midstream, midair, I made it, all its soul of steel athrill. 

Till the storms came up to shake it. Firn^ it stood. Each 
girder twanged 

44 



THE BRIDGE BUILDER 45 

In the wind's wild orchestration. Where my hammers 

beat and clanged 
Every rivet held. And I and all my iron fighting men 
Knew that mind could bind the sky, knew that man was 

master then. 

Flawless where it stood I left it. Finished? No. The 

stage was there. 
Then began a greater building of that drama in the air, 
Millions stage each night and morning, when the wheels 

began to roll. 
In tomorrow's vast cathedral, just one pathway of the 

soul ; 

Just one aisle, I left to others. Men shall mount when I 

am dead. 
Life's procession past my piers shall march, and higher 

overhead 
See the towers of mightier builders. Yet this thing I left 

to be 
Strong, essential, fit for service as the mountains and the 

sea. 

Far, far inland my approaches slowly rise as millions rise. 
Up from bed rock, climbing slowly, come our towers to 
scale the skies. 



46 THE BRIDGE BUILDER 

Like two shackled seraphs standing wing to wing they 

struggle still, 
Bridging man's last baffled ages, till tomorrow shall work 

our will. 

Neiv York, 6-^-14 



CONGRESS CONVENES 

TWO clock hands meet. A chaplain blind invokes 
A god unknown men worship here with lies. 
The business of the session has begun. 
A man from Massachusetts has the floor: 
From Massachusetts: — once she stood for freedom. 

Her manufacturers and union leaders 
Deal with Rhode Island. Kansas intervenes, 
Insurgent, shrewd. Here farm must fight with mill, 
Mine with plantation, poverty with riches. 
Millions with human hearts and hopes that perish. 

Here is no senate stately, of free states. 
We have made here a clearing house of hatreds, 
Mean jealousies and petty greeds and fears. 
Of special interests, monstrous and minute. 
As these hard human lips and eyes of liars. 

These are our masks, our clowns, our Punchinellos: 
Puppets we play with blindly ; and the gods 
Look down and laugh at us who lavish here 
Our souls on shams. For underneath it all 
We live and love and see the stars at night. 

Even these husks contain the hearts of heroes. 
These monstrous paunches human entrails hide ; 
Something that sleeps and may be waked. And walkinj 

47 



48 CONGRESS CONVENES 

Like men asleep they offer gifts to Him 

Who out of endless patience shapes His planets. 

For slowly out of gluttony and lust, 
Blindness and greed, the sentient soul of man 
Wakens to wrongs and wider brotherhood, 
As the first cave man found a world outside 
His stagnant cave; and starward strode forever. 

Peconic, 5-2^-14 



COMMENCEMENT 

THEY are coming from the chapel under trees where 
Lowell walked: 
Gownsmen all in slow procession. Here where Wendell 

Phillips talked, 
Winthrop, Adams, Hancock, Standish, Sumner, Evarts 

live again 
In the names and in the faces of these boys we turn to 
men. 



Alma Mater, first and oldest, in a world no longer new. 

Sternest in thy creed and coldest, striving, grasping, false 
and true: 

All the world demands an answer, law; a gospel here to- 
day: 

In thy eyes would see salvation. But thy gaze is turned 
away. 

All the world is working, striving. Suffering its children 
cry. 

Thou must search thy heart, assure us, lest the soul in us 
should die. 

All these faces, firm and wistful, feet that fall in cadenced 
beat, 

Bring thee nearer to thy moment of new triumph or de- 
feat. 



49 



50 COMMENCEMENT 

At thy word our sires for freedom falling, fifty years ago, 
Drifting in the wind of battle, where men's lives were lost 

like snow, 
Died. Today our war is greater; ghastlier loss its lords 

devise. 
Harder things than lead and steel we feel who reel and 

bow to lies. 

Hate and horror long besiege us. Doubt and error crept 

within, 
Spied within these halls where traitors hide; the restless 

hosts of sin 
Sap our walls. Aloof no longer we may bide. Our 

citadel 
Only can be won by soldiers, rallying where heaven and 

hell 

Wrestle through the world. We send them, these, our 

boys, our last, our best; 
Young, unfitted, blind, aspiring, fearless, to a nation's test. 
War is wreckage, rout and ruin. Drifting shreds of souls 

that fall 
Stumbling forth from shame to triumph, rallying shall hear 

thee call. 

Truth is militant and mighty. We her last reserves shall 
rise. 



COMMENCEMENT 51 

Truth is fearless. We shall find her in these clear, un- 
conquered eyes. 

Truth is ours who free our spirits though our flesh in weak- 
ness dies. 

We shall march behind their shoulders, seeing in their eyes 
that see 

After struggle greater struggle, new Americas to be, 

Maimed and bleeding: till thy word is heard forever clear 
and free. 

New York, 6-8-14 



THE POLICE MAGISTRATE 

THOU who the hearts of men dost weigh, the surgeon 
of our souls today, 
Whose headlines probe our rottenness : Thou that has set 

me here on high 
To scan the symptoms of our sins, to diagnose each choking 

cry 
Of truth and terror, horror, shame, and sin that lives alone 

to die; 
Making thy law a medicine for spirits sick, too tired to 

play ; 



Thou that dost make the mighty small, infected by the city's 

sins ; 
Making thy minor souls the same, the slaves of fear, and 

greed and lust; 
Making red murders merciful, that flowers might blossom 

from the dust; 
Making thy hero's hearts from hell, that men that die 

might learn to trust 
This people's tortured soul that still from wickedness to 

worship wins. 

Draw near to us and bear with us, in this, thy nation's 

hour of trial ; 
For Justice is made merchandise, and judges bought and 

sold like whores. 

52 



THE POLICE MAGISTRATE 53 

They walk the streets with restless eyes. They enter in 

by secret doors. 
They live by power that trades in lies, and light and liberty 

deplores, 
And all the lovely things of life that in the shadows strive 

to smile. 

Their rottenness has left me here in thy law's ante-room ; 

not there 
Where in thy high courts, eyes benign and base, thine equal 

justice wrest. 
Lord, I was jealous for Thy truth. I dreamed that I 

might serve Thee best 
In dignity, and power and ease, where slowly men Thy 

pleadings test; 
Where all Thy last appeals are heard in larger light and 

ampler air. 

There in thy law's last balance room at Washington, the 

scales are set 
To weigh each thousandth part of truth ; and there nine 

men whose souls are thine, 
Make laboratory tests of law^, assay success and power 

malign ; 
Hand thy decisions down to earth. No longer, Lord, 

that goal is mine. 



54 THE POLICE MAGISTRATE 

Here in Thy clinic drear, of crime, I learn to labor and 
forget. 

Here at first hand I deal with life. This power they 

missed I wield alone. 
Here by the altar of Thy law, old sins, old shames, old 

treasons stand: 
Mute supplicants, dumb hopes, sad eyes that see new 

light, a nobler land. 
For men still make tomorrow here. I hold its substance 

in my hand 
Until at last they cast me out, old age or evil, both Thine 

own. 

Peconic, 6—2-14 



T 



THE PUBLIC LIBRARY 



HIS is our bank of learning modern and marble 
floored. 

And here I stand like a teller, and gods men once adored, 
Old rituals of idols, go blindly through my hands 
To a world that faith forgetting, today misunderstands. 
And fails to find in its making a larger law's commands. 



Here we have twenty talents stored and a thousand score. 

And to him that hath shall be given. We lend him more 
and more. 

And from him that lacks shall be taken. And the years 
shall strip away 

From the cheap and the tawdry faces the youth of yester- 
day, 

Readers of tales as vital as a child tells in his play. 

And the cheap and the childish credos, the old ancestral 
lies, 

We slowly learn to sublimate. And error's dark dis- 
guise, 

And the rotting husks and wrappings of truth that the 
simple see, 

We strip from her fair white body. We toil to set her 
free. 

For men made of truth a mummy once and cheated you 
and me. 

55 



56 THE PUBLIC LIBRARY 

This is our city's clinic for its deaf and dumb and blind. 
This is our laboratory where new germs of thought we 

find. 
And one man's mind is a microscope. One strong soul 

soars afar, 
And hales us healing sure and hope, from the orbit of a 

star, 
One larger letter of the law, whose servants all we are. 

We all are the law's small servants; atoms of life today, 
Like the flowers that fade upon my desk, and that child 

that turns away 
Stunted, pale, consumptive, with her heaven In her eye, 
Hugging her book of fairy tales. And she loves each 

golden lie. 
But the world outgrows its fairy tales. And the child 

must grow or die. 

Day after day they come and go, the crude, the cheap, the 

young. 
With their little pitiful poets, and their songs long since 

outsung. 
And the God of all light and glory, who caused His stars 

to be. 
Does He read each childish story that they write for you 

and me? 
This is His laboratory, where He toils to set men free. 
Pe conic, 6-22-14 



WOMEN 



HELEN 

FLOWERS — I cannot bear them for they fade. 
Their fragrance is of death — their fading petals 
Are clods of earth time flings on beauty's coffin. 
For in the full unfolding of the rose, 
There comes a time when the least breath of air, 
The echo of a word, may be her end 
And I am near it. All I have today 
Tomorrow is the wind's, — Be merciful. 

I have been beautiful and known no mercy. 
I have been happy, if this happiness 
Be blooming in the sunlight like a rose. 
Sufficient in itself. But he who gave 
Dew to His roses, gave to souls like mine 
A martyrdom of mirrors, and of tears. 

Here where I watched my woman's blossoming. 
Here where I planned my triumphs and fulfilled them, 
Time turns his first least thread of that torment. I 
Am made my own soul's executioner. 

My mirror is my rack — and I shall see 
When the scars show, the springtime and the dawn ; 
And how I wasted them. And I shall call 
Out of my agony, to lovers dead — 
And to the living this one word. " Remember " ! 

59 



6o HELEN 

And some of them shall hear me. Some of them 
Shall see me in their dreams, and make of me 
An image and a song of suffering, 
Their agony and mine, too true to die; 
Poignant and timeless as the spring herself ; — 
Where men shall see me walking and shall worship 
What I once was in other eyes — forever. 

Seattle, 1 2-5-1 3 



MANNEQUINS 

PALE slaves that swell the triumph of your Pagan 
emperor Poiret, 
Weak captives of your caliph, Worth, around your Roman 

ring we go. 
When Satan's big department store has staged its harness 

women's show. 
When Easter brings its blossoms forth. Outside the 

world is making May, 
And bending to the baby buds, pale sunbeams and frail 

breezes play. 

God gave me brains to see myself as others see. 

He gave me curves that catch the eye, a face that lures 

and hair that flames, 
A heart that trembles through the streets, that shivers at 

their sudden shames. 
He made twenty and unloved, in Satan's dress parade to 

be 
Forever hungry and alone. What hope on earth is there 

for me? 

For prostitutes are on their own. But we who walk your 

tread mill here 
Are made your slaves at second hand, the sport of every 

eye that rolls. 
Sleek odalisques of lust that calls to stronger lust to take 

his tolls: 

6i 



62 MANNEQUINS 

Smeared mirrors of your evil souls that come and stare 

and disappear: 
Until the best of us becomes a creeping pest of greed and 

fear. / 

Here in our last sad circle of your new inferno, Dante's 
brain, 

That wrote in gall and venom, failed to guess our griev- 
ance and despair: 

These robes of princess-prostitutes, that painted flesh is 
proud to wear, 

That Paris and its panders sell. You whisper, smile and 
sneer. Again 

You go your way, the weight you swell of all life's pov- 
erty and pain. 

You leave us for your meaner ends, who wear our livery 

of shame 
Around your Roman ring outside, where you are slaves no 

less than we. 
To us through sunless windows floats one breath of April 

and the sea, 
Of woods where pine trees fringe the sky. You make life 

cruel, vile and tame. 
Till God and man and devil die ; where woman most must 

bear the blame. 

Hong-kong, 1-2 1- 1 4 



THE HANDMAID 

I TRY to say as Mary said, 
" Behold the handmaid of the Lord, 
A smile upon her lips, and dread 
Within her heart, — a sword. 

Today he walked, he came to me, 
Up to life's altar bore his heart. 
I caught him up — too close to see, 
Yet seemed to stand apart. 

Tonight he waked, I held him tight, 
And watched as I went to and fro 
The long processions, through the night, 
Of mothers come and go. 

Up to life's altar and away, 
Each bore her gift, and hushed his cries 
With tired Te Deums. So today 
God hears our lullabies. 

Peconic, p-30-l^ 



63 



LA GITANA 

NONE of the girls of Ronda have feet as fine as 
mine, 
That glimmer and glance through the whirl of the dance 

as fireflies blaze and shine, 
Seen in some shadowy rambla outside a gay cafe. 
None of the girls in Ronda can dance down death, my 
way. 

Carmen and fat Conchita can sell themselves for shoes. 
Black as their souls with the heels of red, such as the 

Cubans use. 
They can sell themselves for their stockings, their spider 

webs of silk. 
And their feet like their brows are brazen, but mine are 

white as milk. 

For mine was a Northern mother my gipsy father found 
In a brothel in Biscaya. And love in drink he drowned. 
So I grew up in the gutter,' slinking and wild to be 
Alone, alive, in the open, sunlit, and flushed and free. 
Naked in running rivers. So I must dance today 
Where the eyes of the men are upon my face and flesh 
like beasts of prey. 

And the tongues of the tawdry women they tear my life 
apart 

64 



LA GITANA 65 

And they smear my name with their women's shame as 

their teeth would tear my heart, 
As they'd rip the flesh away from my face and the bodice 

from my breasts. 
And the wave of life is around me. I am lifted on its 

crests. 
I am lifted high on its surges; and the light it lends my 

eyes 
Is the strength of noon and sunrise and the splendor of 

the skies. 



I am caged in their snarling city, but between its shadowy 
bars 

I see the loom of tomorrow and the altar lights of stars. 

Savage, violent, virgin ; like a trainer in their cage, 

They snarl at my looks like lashes, these women marred 
with age. 

These men that my mind has mastered ; and I rule their 
restless lives 

With my feet that flicker through shadows like the bicker- 
ing light of knives. 

I dance and they bow before me. Barefoot I turn, I 

tread 
On the throbbing hearts of the living and the ashes of 

the dead. 



I 



56 LA GITANA 

I dance till I stop, where he stands apart; till I hold his 

love and hate: 
Master and man and the bravest heart, sultan and slave 

and mate. 
Paris, 5-16-13 



ANNUNCIATION 

ACROSS the air shaft is a window high. 
Across the sill the shadows slowly creep. 
Lilting a little childish lullaby, 
A little maiden lulls a doll to sleep. 

A little childish form that comes and goes, 
That bends above its baby, nurses there 
The warmth of life that opens wide the rose. 
That wraps its buds against the April air. 

Behind her walk dead women wondering 

At the pure rapture in the childish eyes. 

As bright and glad as the first sight of spring. 

The first blue rift in winter's leaden skies. 

Madonnas, saints and sinners, beggars, queens; 
All the pale past, by pain and passion torn ; 
Lean close, as closer to her child she leans, 
Bearing within her heart her babe unborn. 

S.S. Awa Maru, 12-18-13 



67 



A WOMAN 

WHY she married him I don't know. How she sticks 
to him I can't tell. 
Second by second and inch by inch she goes on lifting 

him out of hell. 
Smiles when you see her. Her lips grow tense like a 

tired runner that true to form 
Moves without haste through the swirls of dust that 
follow the feet of the first of the storm. 



Once she was prettier than the rose. Just so simple and 

soft and sweet: 
Laughed like a brook that sings in the spring. Now she 

has toiled past her first defeat. 
Time has taken and hardened her heart to the heart of 

a woman that dares, that bears, 
All things still for the love she lost. Now she has done 

with old visions and prayers. 

Time has trained her to live and to last, making her 

patient and sure and still, 
Thoroughbred, lean and fine: each line is a line of strength. 

She is all one will 
Waking and working and holding fast his life, that shivers 

and shrinks and falls, 
Blundering blindly from door to door in the city's maze 

with its millions of walls. 
68 



A WOMAN 69 

Now she nods where she wasted words as he wastes his 

silver and drains away 
His soul's solution in glasses tall, where he clings to 

each clink. Now day by day 
Her first caresses she wastes no more on the child of her 

fears where she dreads to see 
What in his father she worshipped once, and she never 

looks backward or listens to me. 



Resolute, silent, day after day she lifts him up as he sags 

and shrinks. 
Fighting for breath she goes winning her way. Now no 

longer of shame she thinks, 
Now no more of pleasure or pain, than girlish ribbons and 

dresses outgrown. 
She is a woman, one heart and brain that God first gave 

us to mother its own. 

Dick isn't vicious or wicked or wild; simply weak and 

worthless as waste. 
For wiping life's engines. He keeps her clean and keen 

and shining in breathless haste: 
Just her big baby to wash and to kiss when his face and his 

hands are smeared with the street. 
God Almighty has made her for this, while her heart 

which is His to the limit shall beat. 



70 A WOMAN 

She was my dream. She has grown beyond dreams and 

Dick, and herself, and me. 
She wouldn't drop if they lifted the load. Couldn't be 

wasted. People see 
Day after day in her lips and her eyes one of life's leaders 

and conquerors. 
Something that toils through tides and skies to carry life 

on to tomorrow is hers. 

New York, 6-2 J- 1 4 



BEDTIME 

HE was not willing quite to go, 
And yet he came and clung to me. 
His drowsy eyes could barely see: 
Up the long stairs he stumbled so. 

And there our pilgrimage we made, 
And climbing high to heaven, once more 
I watched his wistful lips adore 
The God that makes the stars afraid. 

I stood beside him and I sang 
As the young planets, choiring, when 
They first conceived the souls of men. 
Through all the aisles of heaven rang. 

He heard me. In his sleep he smiled: 
And a new moonbeam in the night 
Crept from the clouds, a prayer in white; 
Kissed as I kissed, my little child. 

Portland, Oregon, 1 2-3-1 3. 



71 



THE OLD MOTHER 

FROM my body, heart and brain 
He was born to give me pain. 
In his making I was made, 
In his sins my soul is weighed. 

I lost sleep that he might sleep, 
Dared not weep lest he should weep. 
Long I watched him through the night. 
One small will I called to light : 

All a lifetime fighting in 
One small baby's fevered skin. 
Death I wrestled with and threw : 
Watched him wake. So dear he grew. 

He has work to justify 
Now, and one as near as I ; 
Work too easy, wife too slight: 
Once more watching all the night, 

I grow slowly sure and wise. 
So he missed his father's eyes. 
Still his father's spirit lives 
Somewhere in him. Life forgives. 

All when he comes back to me 
Tired and sad and glad to be 
72 



\ 



THE OLD MOTHER 73 

Just a little child once more, 
Near me on the nursery floor. 

Then my hand upon his brow- 
Holds his heart. And I know now 
How to suffer for his sake 
Till his soul in strength shall wake. 

Pe conic, 8-^-14 



HER BIRTHDAY 

EIGHTEEN already? Still It seems 
This world of wickedness is good. 
Still she sees sunrise in her dreams; 
The mysteries of maidenhood 
Lie like light shadows on her brow; 
Her lips are like red rosebuds now. 

Soon they shall open like her heart. 
I watch her, wistful, wondering. 
When time's last petals fall apart 
Shall she still singing smile at spring? 
She smiles at me; and shall we fear 
September, dear, when spring is here? 

Her eyes have looked on lovely things 

So long, their light is loveliness. 

Her thoughts are white ; their tender wings 

Like flitting butterflies caress 

All souls that seared by sin and pain 

Still on the side of light remain. 

Her voice is beauty, born to be 
The music clear of love that thrills 
Through her young pulses. So is she 
Sister of streams and stars and hills. 
She is one word that God has made 
To meet tomorrow unafraid. 
74 



HER BIRTHDAY 75 

While the warm fragrance of her soul 
Blends with the air I breathe, I know 
She is one part of one great whole, 
That sends her sisters like the snow 
To make this world one moment white ; 
But some like starlight in the night. 

PeconiCj y-j-14 



EVE 

I SAW our surgeon and I know. 
There was white iris in his vase. 
Today I have begun to grow. 
I saw my mission in his face. 

For I was wilful and perverse, 

A girl as giddy as the rest. 

And soon life's hunger I shall nurse, 

And feel his fingers on my breast. 

I wondered as I walked the streets, 
Watching where other women stood, 
In whom this double pulsing beats. 
The holy word of Motherhood, 

That stirred in me. And one I saw; 
Her face was strange and grave and sweet 
A living letter of God's law. 
She was my sister in the street. 

I met my mirror. Suddenly, 

I saw another standing there — 

Older than I. And I could see 

Her brow was drawn with pain and care. 

Her lips were lovely, and her eyes, 
Mirrored all wisdom and delight. 
76 



EVE 77 

Her lips were sweet as lullabies. 
Her face was wonderful and white. 

Her arms were strong to hold me fast, 
While tears between my eyelids stole. 
She kissed me. And I know at last 
Today my body bears a soul. 

Peconic, ^-^0-14 



ARTS 



THE LEADER 

FOUR more than four score bowmen, to wing the 
shafts of sound 
My craft has gathered round me. My violins are 

drowned 
By the sound of drums and brasses like an army's mightier 

guns. 
And now to the highest circles of the crowded house 

there runs 
My summons. I seize, I sway them, I lift them high, I 

hold 
Two seconds; sound and silence. And each is made of 

gold. 

And the beasts that lurk in blackness, and the powers 
of night draw back. 

I was your spirit's leader. But little might I lack 

Of the God that fills my fingers, the truth that I trans- 
late. 

I was a force for your breathlessness, and mastership of 
fate. 



I have drilled the Devil's dance of death through the 

halls of huge hotels. 
I have led the iron drums of war where the roar of battle 

swells. 
I was a minnie-singer and music's man at arms, 

8i 



82 THE LEADER 

Selling myself for a season to wealth that wastes and 

harms. 
So have I gathered my bowmen, captains of five and ten, 
Haggled and cringed and hoarded to lift my head again. 

I was the mind that made them. I am the will that 

calls. 
Like a keyboard loud I played them. They trembled, 

hearts and walls 
Till she came, my white soprano, and music's mouth 

indeed. 
And her grace-notes glide and linger and I no longer 

lead. 

I and my mercenaries have toiled and earned our truce 
We have swayed your hearts to silence and justified our 

use. 
But her voice evokes the fairies whose fingers set men 

free 
From folly and forgetfulness that fetter you and me. 

I have mastered you and marshalled you. You hung 

upon my hand. 
But high above my battlements of sound I see her stand. 
Like God's own herald proclaiming His terms of peace 

to all. 



THE LEADER 83 

And I alone am kneeling in the shadow of the wall, 
For I, mjA birthright shaming, no nearer home may win; 
While to the very vault of heaven, her spirit enters in. 

New York, 12-IJ-12 



THE RECITAL 

THEY groped in darkness till thc}' heard the har- 
monies of wind and seas. 
They felt the lilt of flying feet. They took the tune of 

water falls. 
They knew the notes of birds and all the hungry forest's 

harsher calls; 
Till from long terror and delight they learned their 

music by degrees. 
From war-drums throbbing through the night, from 

conches hoarse to Bacchus blown, 
From clashing brass that Cybele adored, each chord they 

made their own. 

Dull nerves time tuned through centuries grew tense; 
raw voices clearer rang. 

Then came the masters. Ear and hand and brain con- 
ceived and caused to be, 

Till harp and drum were harmonized and harpsichord 
and spinet rang. 

They framed their formal scale of sound, they plotted 
curves of harmony. 

Made music's mathematics, wrote its formula and codified 

The truth life told them, note by note, its secrets that 
in silence hide. 

They listened to the infinite and heard the Word that 
comprehends 

84 



THE RECITAL 85 

All wisdom and all ecstasy; and faltering as children 

speak, 
Fearing the voice revealed to them, they tried to tell what 

sound transcends. 
Today the world that conquers fear and goes beyond 

where they were weak 
Has no such singers. Here I sit and sound the scales 

of life today. 
And I have power, and I have skill and I have hearing 

when I play. 

I have an instrument intense and adequate, with nerves 

of steel 
As the new world you live in now; a new projection of 

the hands 
That flit like butterflies and fall like cataracts; that 

make you feel 
The child's delight, the sea's unrest, the soul of love that 

understands 
All sorrows and all mysteries on earth that makes us what 

we are: 
The fragrance of the fading rose, the splendor of the 

falling star. 

Something intangible I touch, new wireless messages 
translate. 



86 THE RECITAL 

I see their stories in your eyes, and on your trembling 

lips detect, 
The power I seize to sway your souls, to summon them to 

strive with fate, 
Till my piano, throbbing, drones a dynamo of intellect. 
And then I see those trembling hands that to life's limit 

drew so near, 
Ten fingers blind stretched out to God to bring one echo 

to your ear. 

Los Angeles, ll-iy-ij 



THE DEAD SCULPTOR 

T TE might have been a mother. So 
•*■ -*■ He lived with life. In travail sore 
He brought to light the love he bore, 
And paid the debt all living owe. 

He touched its substance. Tenderly 
He felt the spirit in the clay 
And gave it shape. Like hands that sway 
The keys that sound a symphony, 

His fingers played with light and shade; 
Till in some splendid strength of line 
He made of matter chords divine 
That quiver ever. Life he weighed, 

In human hands, as mothers hold 
Their babies' bodies to the light: 
As priests before their altar bright 
Lift up the host. The truth he told, 

In one great, common mother tongue 
To all the world in praise and prayer. 
Men felt their burdens lifted where 
They found his heart forever young. 

And still it beats in bronze and stone, 
And still he smiles in sculptured lips, 
87 



88 THE DEAD SCULPTOR 

That whisper what his finger tips 
Caressed, divined, and made his own. 

And still his soul in sleepless eyes 
Looks out at us and lives again: 
And past their night of prayer and pain 
Finds one last light where dying dies. 

Pe conic, 6-IJ-14 



THE SECRET 

I CANNOT paint the gateway to our garden and 
July. 
An arch of half trimmed cedar spars, a diamond blue of 

sky, 
Between two long green trellises of grapevines. Over 

all 
The little rambler roses in their crimson thousands crawl. 

Ten thousand crimson butterflies upon our arbor lit. 

The sunbeams kiss their petals and the shadows softly 
flit 

Through the gate that leads to gladness where blue lark- 
spurs bloom and sway. 

White sweet williams, purple centered, nod their welcome 
by the way. 

There are honeysuckle hedges sweet, where yellow lips and 

white 
Drink the dew drops, breathing morning back. Their 

lamps of pure delight 
All the roses softly lighting on the altar of today 
Flame aspiring, yield adoring, scent and color caught from 

clay. • 

I cannot paint the glory and the gladness. I can show 
Flakes of color, flecks of sunshine, shadows long, green 
trees below, 

89 



90 THE SECRET 

Where the pansies open eyes beneath small brows that 

seem to see 
Straight and clear and everlasting, the secret lost to me. 

I can only dream of rainbows, dead last year, today re- 
born; 

I can only see lost sunsets, all the gates of night and 
morn. 

Leaking out stray rays of glory, till I tremble: till one 
thrill 

Of all life upon my canvas lies. The rest is dead and 
still: 

Till a brooding robin singing, life interprets; and I seize 
Something of the droning, purring bliss of humming birds 

and bees; 
Till two laughing children, calling, clasp their mother: and 

I know 
Why the Lord of storms and perils sends His roses here to 

grow. 

Peconic, 6-24-14 



THE TOUCHSTONE 

YES, sculpture's hell from start to finish till at last 
The work shall stand alone; the dream your heart 
conceived 
To manhood's stature grown, the thought your brain 

received, 
The shape your hands have held, the life you felt, has 

passed 
Out of your agonies: until the stone Is cut, the bronze Is 
cast. 

You write ; your fountain pen your baton black transcribes, 
Thought's Instant symphony, that for the few transcends 
All that we see or feel. You play. Your music rends 
Sparse heart strings tuned to It and ceases. All the tribes 
Of earth that heard you not, shall still to death resign 
their sordid bribes. 

You paint; your magic wand, your screen of light may 

throw 
New luster glad on life, new shadows of the light 
That lives In every man, whose dreams you daub with 

night. 
You paint upon one plane. You trick us, and we know 
Most of all arts that fall on earth, to earth the darkest 

debt you owe. 



91 



92 THE TOUCHSTONE 

Yet man may live through paint, where some strong soul 

is found 
To vitalize its lure; as man through words may live, 
Through sounds, life's echoes faint. But we its substance 

give. 
You make your medium slight, elusive. Truth profound 
You mirror or betray. But we who try to shape life in 

the round. 

Our burden heavier is who deal with weightier things, 
With matter dull, inert, with cold and clogging clay. 
Life in the rough we shape, its husks we shred away: 
Its essence bring to light; till every flaw that clings 
Falls from our hands, that hold at last the truth that lives 
in stone that sings. 

No soundingboard it needs, no roof, no study walls, 
From every angle seen, it stands in square and street. 
Each line as fine and clean as truth made fit to meet 
All ; critic ; child ; each life that halts, that hopes, that 

crawls, 
To touch today's white monument of will that still to- 
morrow calls. 

Peconic, y-12—14 



THE SICK EDITOR 

ONCE I was young and I trusted time, and my star 
rode far and high. 
And art was life, and an editor was God's own ardent 

eye. 
Now, day by day, each pleasant lie, each dearest dream 
must die. 



Yesterday noon I was watching a gang of Dagoes at the 
pier 

Where the city's waste is winnowed out. A lump of 
coal lay here. 

Maybe a diamond lurked in this endless screen of sweep- 
ings drear. 

Acres of wasted paper pass. My hook goes out to seize 
Some ragged smear of blood and mud, some scrap of aim- 
less ease, 
Like a paper rose that a child has made. And you read 
such rags as these. 

And the mills of God's imfamies grind on. And copy 

ceaseless flows. 
In farms and sweatshops grinding on, each tired typewriter 

goes. 
And I see their frayed processionals of faithless verse and 

prose. 

93 



94 THE SICK EDITOR 

God that has given us life to live and His w^ords of life 
to say, 

God that our hearts so much forgive: did His heart fore- 
see this day, 

When He laid His kiss on the lips of Eve and He 
moulded Eden's clay? 

And His little children of letters come, clever and still 

and shy. 
Some with a poet's prescience, some with want in each 

wide eye. 
And the tender lips grow tired and numb, and the dearest 

dreams must die. 

Each is a bread line Edith says. And Edith's eyes see 

all. 
And I measure them out my alms of time. And day by 

day they crawl 
With their little shivering loves and hates through a hole 

in the office wall. 

And the littlest, cleverest children of all that the wear>' 

souls of men 
Play with because they pass the time: they cash their 

checks, and then 
Some tired typewriter gets to work and wastes God's 

words again. 



THE SICK EDITOR 95 

Once the morning stars together sang and life was fair 

and free, 
Fine as each line in Edith's hair when her stare turns 

back to me. 
For we are the slaves of swift success, and its sweepings, 

I and she. 

And summer time is weeks away, and the mountains dim 

and far. 
And we all are heaps of crumbling clay. God's searchers 

gray we are 
Who toil to find one gem today, tonight to see one star. 

Parisj 4-8-14 



ART IN THE SLUMS 

BLINDLY you snatched at surfaces like children, 
Painted your prostitutes of money kings: 
There where you smeared life's face with rouge and 

powder. 
Lying, you trick today with trivial things. 
Art is an angel. You have bound her wings. 

Art is the heart's long hunger for enduring. 
Art is the restless will that wrestles past 
Hunger and pain and loneliness in silence. 
Art is the faith that feasts where flesh must fast. 
Art is the soul that lives in strength at last: 

Keen as a surgeon's scalpel, clean, unswerving. 
Seeking the truth that meets today's demands; 
Cleaving all surface lures, to seize the secret: 
Art is the brain that sees and understands. 
Art is the loving touch of tender hands. 

You have not known her. You have smeared like chil- 
dren, 
Colors of greed, and sordid haste and shame; 
Colors that shriek for crowds upon the pavement; 
Pictures life tramples underfoot. Your fame 
Breaks like a bubble who blaspheme her name. 

Art is a child. Its artist, like a mother, 
Suffers all things to bring this life to birth; 

96 



ART IN THE SLUMS 97 

Nurses it, clasps It, loves it for a life time; 
Grows with it slowly, making sorrow mirth 
When art's long patience shall possess the earth. 

Art is the service you have scorned, who blindly 
Snatched her least gifts. Her temple stands obscure, 
Far from the eyes of riches. All who sorrow 
See her in truth that stands while days endure. 
Art is God's gospel painted for the poor. 

Peconicj 6—2g—i^ 



THE CURATOR 

MEMPHIS this mirror made immortal. I like to 
think of the smooth brown faces; 
A dancer's smile like the Nile in sunlight, a priest like 

the heads on his mummy cases ; 
Placid and wise, unchanging, watching the life that comes 

and the life that goes, 
In little ripples that lapse forever the w^ay that his smooth 

brown river flows, 
Life that rippled my dancer's lips when she bent from this 

bronze till she kissed a rose. 

And her sister priestesses of Isis some old Egyptian lover 

painted, 
Tripping along by the Nile to the temple, like these Greek 

girls by grief untainted, 
In a fragment white of a frieze from Corinth, with their 

youth that the years can never kill. 
And we worshipped life till we made Madonnas. And 

we painted passions pure that thrill, 
Stirred by the growth of the god within them. I can 

see them smile in the shadow still. 



Joy was always beautiful. Slowly beauty in sorrow we 

learned to render. 
Wistful lips with their pain prophetic making relentless 

truth more tender. 

98 



THE CURATOR 99 

Then came Rembrandt and beauty in ruins found in the 

beggar, in faces old 
Warped by the storms of the barren seasons. Today you 

tell me that art is cold, 
Hearing no voice, seeing no visions; and art draws near 

to her age of gold. 

Millions of years have mixed her pigments, savage dyes 

for her face preparing. 
Fear gave color. The shaman's symbols imaged a night 

full of fiends unsparing. 
Rough brown idols, blackened by bloodshed slowly shaped 

to the gods of Greece, 
White in the sun for one hour. And never has art yet 

won for her soul release. 
Art is a pilgrimage that ceases, only when life on this 

earth shall cease. 



Now through these halls I can see them marching, pio- 
neers of her years unreckoned, 

Monks with their manuscripts illumined, masters old of 
one human second. 

Now we have made a new world in a minute, millionfold 
power remultiplied. 

You of 5^our little faith who are fretful, look for your 
art your heart inside. 



loo THE CURATOR 

Art Is the j^ounger sister of science. Just so long shall 
her secrets hide. 

Science is patience, art is her sister. Now we are testing 

her spectrum slowly. 
Common things show in rarer colors, shed new light over 

streets unholy. 
And the world is newly rich. It is dazzled by a myriad 

sudden and shifting goals. 
And the blindest paint the harlots of millions, advertize 

art that must take its tolls 
From surfeit and waste, while it toils with the toilers: 

till it sees, till it feels, till it fills men's souls. 

San Francisco, ii-jo-13 



PICTURES FOR MEN 

I MUST paint pictures of men in a world of men 
that toil, 
Men on bent masts at sea in the lee of the drip of oil, 
Lashed to a sea anchor; men in a ship in the grip of the 

frozen floes. 
Blasting the ice into rainbowed hail: men where the 

grail in a stoke hole glows: 
Men in full dories laboring homeward into the night 
through the gray water rows. 



Men in the mines that drill until June swings round to 

June: 
Stabbing the guts of earth with their bomb tipped steel 

harpoon : 
Lashed by the fringe of a blast, falling where fire damp 

spreads : 
Men that fall under our feet; men that drive over our 

heads ; 
Tracking the trail of the reeking rail and racing the 

storms through the gray watersheds. 

Men in long cuts and fills in the forests; men in the 

mist, 
Swinging wet girders home while the rusting cables twist, 
Locking the wards of the bridge; men whose new cities 

rise 

lOI 



I02 PICTURES FOR MEN 

Laying steel floor upon floor like bricks to bind the skies. 
Men that the quicksands have caged in the pit, where the 
last deep foundation its vortex defies. 

Men at new motors of life, white as they skid through 

night: 
Men on tall traveling cranes: in the subway's shuttles of 

light, 
Men in dim submarines: men in a mob in the street 
Cleaving the crowds with their clashing gongs: men on 

the roofs, that meet 
Dragging their hose over crashing walls, where the granite 

flows down the billows of heat. 

Men that dissect the stars, divorce the atoms, where 
Plague in the test tube boils, men whose clear thought 

is prayer; 
Men with the surgeon's knife cutting old sins away 
From the rotting limbs of life, till they stand to serve 

today. 
I must paint pictures of men, of their hands, till my hands 

and pictures together shall pray. 

Too long we have learned to play with art and life's 

laces and silk, 
Meddled with women's skins and muddled with roses and 

milk : 



PICTURES FOR MEN 103 

And the world demands today a word of life at our 

hands. 
And we may not turn away longer from life's demands. 
I shall paint pictures of masters that say how the soul 

of the street in its mastery stands. 

PeconiCj 8-10-14 



TRUTH 

ALL the rest shall fall away, 
Flake and fade. But this alone 
Stands tomorrow and today 
Like God's statutes strong in stone. 

Athens carved them slowly so, 
Florence flamed in bronze that lives; 
Gave their gods. The rest shall go. 
Time that nothing false forgives, 

Tests your strength and sleight of hand, 
Racks your heart and rends your brain. 
Till your soul can understand 
All things perfect born of pain. 

Every slight and sordid lie. 
Each black treason to the light, 
Every lesser lust shall die : 
Till your will glows still and white. 

Envy, rancor, fear and pride, 

Praise that lures, and blame that brands, 

Failure faced and greed denied 

Fuse life's essence to your hands. 

Then beneath your canvas glows, 
Through your bronze and marble thrills 
104 



TRUTH 105 



Color fairer than the rose, 
Strength that shall outlast the hills. 

Through your words a wisdom sings, 
That the world's last need demands: 
Until time your message brings 
To life's service sure that stands. 

Peconic, 8-1-14 



REGIONAL 



LITTLE BRIDES OF MARY 

LIKE the color of a dewdrop in the morning of the 
year, 
Like a bluebird heard in April on a note that's far and 

near, 
Like the blossoms white that catch the light where serried 

cherry trees 
Lift their snowdrifts up the hillside, petals trembling on 
the breeze: 

They begin to bud and blossom in the mother's month 

of May, 
With their tyts of unwise angels, childish voices grave 

and gay: 
With their little childish footsteps, down the highways, 

through the streets 
Everywhere that France, that Paris their white litany 

repeats : 

Childish voices put their questions, whisper words they 

never know, 
Where in Paris, where in peril, through perdition must 

we go? 
Who of us shall find perfection in the pallid paths of 

peace ? 
Who in grime, and who in slime and bloodshed earn red 

life's release? 

109 



no LITTLE BRIDES OF MARY 

Who of us shall sin and stronger grow, so serve the Lord 

of all, 
Life the Moloch, life the maker of His stars and servants 

small ; 
Life the master of our armies and the children's last 

crusade ; 
Little petals white of worship, born today to fall and 

fade. 

They are gone. The streets of Paris strike their strange 

and strident notes. 
Through their symphony of living something sacred sings 

and floats; 
Something that one sees at sunset, through the shadows 

of a shrine. 
In each small white altar light of love that dying makes 

divine. 

Paris, 5-20-1^ 



THE HOST IN THE HHLS 

YOU live in the shaded valleys; you die on the treeless 
plains : 

And blind go down to darkness. Your dust alone re- 
mains. 

You toil in the restless city. You choke in its stagnant 
smoke, 

Though once to the light in a woman's eyes your strug- 
gling spirit woke: 

Mount to the mounts of vision with a heart that hopes 
and thrills, 

Though your breath shall fail as you take the trail to 
the highway of the hills : 

To these old Italian cities that a wiser world has made, 
Where war and love w^ere the workers, and art was the 

bride of trade, 
And the lust of the brute was bondsman and master day 

and night, 
Of Faith that found its God in flesh and bound each cross 

crowned height 
With a chain of stone and story, where vine and olive climb 
Up through the time scarred summits, to blue skies un- 
touched by time. 

Cortona's Citadel defies the years. Assisi here 
With Francis, God's good prodigal, the saints in heaven 
revere. 

Ill 



112 THE HOST IN THE HILLS 

Perugia rears her ramparts proud, her griffin's nest of 

stone. 
FoHgno crests her holy height. Her houses gray have 

grown 
Like lichens from the living rock. And like one starless 

sea, 
Wave after wave the Apennines are wonderful and 

free. 

Here is a world of wonder: no less where you shall go 
Through shaded lanes and court yards close, and love 

and labor know. 
Where dead Etruscan husbandmen their terraced gardens 

piled ; 
Where Perugino taught his trade and Raphael toiled and 

smiled ; 
And goats that crop the hedges rear high beside the way: 
And young Admetus drives them forth from a world too 

old to play. 

Toil upon ceaseless toiling these walls of giants laid, 
And stone on stone of truth they squared and set whose 

hands have made 
Rampart and tower, and tomb and shrine. There priests 

and choirsters led 
In long processionals the host; but they who knelt and 

bled 



THE HOST IN THE HILLS 113 

To make their masonry the throne of God unknown on 

high; 
Look where they left bare steps of stone to altars in the 

sky. 

Perugia, 6-2 1- 1 J 



KARMA 

THROUGH the dying brazen booming of the throb- 
bing temple bells, 
Through the streets of old Kyoto, to the hearts of liv- 
ing men. 
Runs a thinner note that waves, quavers, rises, sinks and 

swells ; 
Till the drifting dust is shifting, dancing to a samisen. 



They were lovers in the springtime. They were happy 

for a night. 
For a day they lived like lovebirds born of light, of 

Buddha s smile. 
Walking where the cherry blossoms hid the world with 

walls of white. 
And the blossoms, falling, calling, whispered warnings 

all the while. 

" O the agonies of lovers! He was poor and she a slave. 
Youngest in the Yoshiwara. All their years of youth we 

knew. 
Made one sword our key to midnight, lay together in the 

grave. 
Karma called us through the ages till we lived at last in 

you. 

'' O the agonies of lovers!'' Though the singer's smile 
is old, 

114 



KARMA 115 

Lustreless her lips, and sightless eyes that long have 

looked at pain, 
Through her voice her heart revealing, like a slender wire 

of gold, 
Steals a thrill of vital feeling calling souls to life again. 

Through the faces gray and dying, through the old Kyoto 

streets, 
Runs a trembling of old heart strings to her fingers worn 

and sure. 
Of a million million lovers, each his love in April meets 
On the lips of girls around her, wistful, fair, and warm 

and pure. 

Kyoto, 12-SI-13 



BISKRA 

GOD'S gray earth as God first made it, Biskra brings 
to you and me. 
Round about the green oasis like a frozen, dusty sea. 
Hills and dunes surge on and halt. Here the French a 

desert found, 
Went to work and built a railroad. Now the wheels go 

rolling round. 
Down to Biskra from the mountains, down two slender 

strands of steel 
Where the master of tomorrow strikes a note the nomads 

feel. 

All the wires beside the rails that thrill with preludes 

strange and new. 
Of the song today is singing ; sound its tensions stern and 

true ; 
Stir the desert. Desolation wakes and living water flows 
Out of earth in wells artesian till the grayness greener 

grows. 
Muddy irrigation ditches, ripples dull that leap and run, 
Spell the motives of tomorrow's larger life beneath the 

sun. 

Biskra stirs, and life electric through her tents in tumult 
thrills. 

Here the desert; there the sunlight feels the clash of mas- 
ter wills, 

ii6 



BISKRA 117 

Stony hills where hell's huge seething cauldron fought to 

overflow ; 
Sandy dunes for aeons drifting; now a stronger master 

know. 
Man growls more. And men who blindly yesterday the 

line surveyed 
Human brutes who bore its sleepers; God's own path to 

glory made. 

Yesterday they scaled their levels, yesterday through tun- 
nels toiled, 

Starved and suffered on the desert, saw their starkest ef- 
forts foiled ; 

Yesterday they won to water; dying slaked our thirst. 
And we 

Down to Biskra, o'er the mountains bring unrest that stirs 
the sea; 

Bring the city, bring the spirit of its struggles, of its sins; 

Life that creeps and life that soaring, still to wider wor- 
ship wins. 

Biskra bows before its altars. Idle tourists stare and 
pass, 

And the God unknown that made them sees each spread- 
ing growth of grass. 

Sees new gardens; smiles; and slowly suns from utmost 
midnight draws. 



ii8 BISKRA 

Sends His light to man that slowl)^ masters time's eternal 

laws. 
Biskra smiles, and Biskra burns; and Biskra's arc-lights 

in the sand 
Mark the trail where man goes marching till his soul 

shall understand. 

Algiers, 3-^9-H 



COVENT GARDEN 

GRAY old Covent Garden bears its blossoms fair of 
song, 
Bears its flowers in murky airs. They blossom all day 

long, 
Free to all who chance to see. Here are bought and 

sold 
Little living miracles of sunlight scented gold. 
Suns and stars and galaxies, j'^ours to have and hold. 

Incense of the dews and dawn drawn for many a mile, 
Come in slow procession while the gutter children smile. 
Beauty past the windows blind the plodding carters bring, 
Radiance of the rainbows mixed with all the airs of 

spring, 
London's ancient offering to life, her lord and king. 

English pink primroses that a drunken hag has pressed 
Close against her mask of pain to gain a moment's rest ; 
Paler stars that shine where death his dirges slow recites, 
Roses red that women wear through golden days and 

nights. 
Little laughing marigolds and violets, shy delights. 

All are in the traffic that our motor marches through. 
Hooting through their fragrance on our way to Water- 
loo. 
We have watched the magic of the moment that is May, 

119 



I20 COVENT GARDEN 

We have heard our morning mass; where London, grim 

and gray 
Makes its sweetest offering to joy that dies today. 

S.S. St. Paul 5-4-14 



THE SALESMAN 

YESTERDAY as I was waiting by the gate at Water- 
loo, 
Came a porter with his load of trunks and slowly trucked 

them through. 
And some were labelled Zanzibar, some Delagoa Bay, 
With a cricket bag high on the top, where the English 

work and play 
Five thousand miles away from home as their fathers used 
to do. 

And I wondered as I watched him if that porter ever 
thought 

How he thrust an empire onward with the baggage that 
he brought 

From that little northern island, that from pole to south- 
ern pole 

Thrusts its outposts through the oceans, while the years 
like oceans roll 

Around its crumbling fringes, till its final war is fought. 

And I w^ondered if he pondered on new strikes for cent 

per cent, 
On the rising cost of living and the higher cost of rent, 
If no gleam of sudden insight made his service seem di- 
vine, 
If he saw he sent new pioneers on to fill the firing line 
Of England on its outposts in God's darkest continent. 

121 



122 THE SALESMAN 

I suppose he went on walking with no eye to look within 
On some book beyond the Bible that should make new 

worlds begin 
In a Boer's benighted brain, and there perhaps he laid his 

hands 
On God's messages of music that should bring divine 

commands 
To some Kaffir in the desert with a soul to lose or win. 

Possibly he saw the pictures of a painter's palette there, 
Or a surgeon's case of scalpels, bits of things that babies 

wear. 
Fashioned by today's Madonnas with the prayers that 

make divine 
Daily sacraments of living. So he trucked them down the 

line, 
With his stolid stride and shoulders, shoulders big and 

bowed and square. 

Life today is mostly luggage. I sell motors for my pains. 
And I keep the traffic moving over mountains, over plains. 
My new models over oceans I go trucking ; and I see 
Men and women marching in them, God's new models 

that shall be 
Of tomorrow I am making while I wait for steamer 

trains. 

S,S. St. Paul 5-5-14 



NATURE AND THE PIT 

SATURDAY afternoon in June, I warm the country- 
side. 
I paint the hills with purple. My arms I open wide. 
Saturday afternoon in June the playhouse and the halls 
Where the housetops hide the vistas, stifle my clearest 

calls. 
And the little, pitiful people, single and double line. 
Shuffle and crawl along the wall. Without a world di- 
vine 
Waits on the Surrey reaches, in Kentish woods and lanes. 
And little people huddle here, and hide from fear and 

pains. 
A beggar whines along the line. A sick girl casts away 
Into his hat the coppers of her heart's last holiday. 

They form them up in fours at last. They pass the wicket 

through. 
London's last ragged regiment in tawdry dress review. 
Kismet! The curtain rises. The beggar whines and 

prays 
Till Allah's will prepares for him at last his day of days. 
A harlot's lips are loosed in smiles as Hadji the cynic 

speaks. 
And love has kindled rosy lights on a woman's wasted 

cheeks. 
He grasps at gold and women. He fights his foes to 

kill. 

123 



124 NATURE AND THE PIT 

Adventure wakes in eyes malign, and restless hands are 

still. 
Kismet! The curtain falls as Allah's caliph's will is 

told, 
The beggar banished. Hearts that flamed grow dull and 

cold and old. 

And little various vices and sins in sordid shapes 

Wait at the curb and watch for them. And men who 

once were apes 
Have lost their hour of wonder as I my hour have lost. 
You have made of me a harlot. Today you pay the 

cost. 
You make my children cruel and tame, and trite and 

vile. 
And out in the open spaces, I live and learn to smile. 
You make my vagrants vermin, and I return their taints 
To the voices of your virgins and the visions of your 

saints. 
You hunt me from the open and I steal and double past 
The shadows black that shroud the pit to save you at the 

last. 

London, 4-20— 14 



APRIL IN THE LUXEMBOURG 

EARTH that slept is waking, stirring, parting veils of 
April rain, 

Thrusting back the clouds. And Paris feels her fresh- 
ness green again. 

Winds of March that hushed, have whispered. Smiling 
ripples idly stir 

Through the blue where birds are calling, falling. Day's 
first worshipper 

Calls the restless soul of Paris up to life and light with 
her. 



God w^ho made His earth a garden, made them man and 

woman there, 
Made the sky to be His shadow, made His flowers of 

April fair, 
Made the trees to be His temples, made the birds His 

heart to sing. 
Made His love to shape the Issues of each least and living 

thing, 
Made His Paris for His pleasure, in His smile which is 

the spring. 

Paris passes from the shadows. Through her streets of 

greed and shame 
Seeks His garden in the open, sees each tulip's torch of 

flame, 

125 



126 APRIL IN THE LUXEMBOURG 

Goes to greet the sun her lover like the wind. With eye- 
lids wet 
Leaning on her latest lover, every little midinette 
Smiles and hoards one hour of hope that all her life shall 
not forget : 

Wakes by bird song from her garret, steals through shad- 
ows to today, 

Where the w^inds with waving fountains from their cen- 
sers scatter spray; 

Where the lilacs lift her eyelids, till the dawn has drawn 
her lips. 

All things wonderful that women treasure up till love's 
eclipse, 

Lift her till all life lies trembling at her trembling finger 
tips. 

In the shadows he is waiting, small and furtive, mean and 
old. 

But his heart mounts up to meet her, there to share her 
hour of gold. 

There she holds her Host to Heaven. For one hour 
there glorified 

She is Eve in God's own garden, she whose son for sin- 
ners died; 

Till the iron wheels of Paris grind to dust the day out- 
side. 
Paris, 4-2^-14 



SOLDIERS OF LIFE 

I HAVE finished my regular stint at last, I have written 
my thousand words today, 
Ranged my last regiment raw in ranks, drilled them and 

driven them down their way. 
Sent them to reinforce the rest till my book is an army 

made complete. 
And sudden, the sound of a bugle blast peals through the 
rush of this Paris street. 

Thrilling the length of the boulevard, twenty-four trum- 
pets of brass begin, 

Where the houses stand in two ranks on guard, to blare 
through the traffic, their way to win. 

Cleaving the press like the point of a lance, through a 
mist that melts, through a drizzle of rain. 

Soldiers of France into light advance, and the sun leaps 
out into sight again. 

Nearer and nearer the columns come, longer and longer 

stretches the line. 
Faster and faster beat the drums, the red legs twinkle, the 

bayonets shine, 
And Paris wakes out of her mid-day trance, her pulses 

quicken, her eyeballs gleam, 
And she halts and huzzas for her soldiers of France, and 

a song in steel, and a scarlet dream. 

12/ 



128 SOLDIERS OF LIFE 

Soldiers of France, you are mine today, and I stand at my 

window and heart and hand. 
Crippled and halt, hidden away, leap up at the light of 

your fatherland. 
At the red in her blood, at the lilt in her voice, at the song 

of freedom for all she sings. 
Soldiers of France, march on, rejoice till they fester and 

fall, all their pestilent kings. 

Soldiers of France on the last frontiers of life and freedom 

through jungles dark, 
You are pioneers, and you blaze the way for us who halt 

in our homes and mark 
The sweat you shed, and the blood that's red, and the dead 

and dying that thread your trails. 
Blood of the legions Napoleon led, that Caesar sum- 
moned, France never fails. 

Battered and bloody she sinks to her knees, till with one 

hand on her mother earth. 
Splendid and sure through the smoke she sees beyond the 

battle, new freedom's battle. 
We who are waging our war with words, on faith and 

freedom's final frontiers. 
We are your brothers, her spirit's heirs; for us a vision, a 

voice appears. 



SOLDIERS OF LIFE 129 

Jehanne, the saint and the soldier maid, and the soul of 

France and her soldiers still, 
Battered and bleeding and unafraid, she lives in Paris our 

hearts to thrill. 
Still in the sunset her spirit stands on its pyre of fire, on 

the Martyr's hill. 
Soldiers of France, though we die alone, while we halt 

by the side of your Mount Parnasse, 
While we read the leaves of your book of stone, till in 

the shadows all passions pa^s. 
We may win to the wonder round the throne, to her walls 

of onyx, her towers of glass. 

Paris, ^-10- 1 J 



EMIGRANTS 

'IXT'HITECHAPEL courts were killing us where fog 

' ' and smoke choke children's breath. 

The Argentine had stripped our farms. Our England 

slowly starved to death. 
A letter came from Edm.onton. We saw a poster In the 

Strand ; 
Like pavement pictures crude, of chalk, we planned our 

people's Promised Land. 
When debts and drink had dragged us down to Surrey 

docks where drop lights shine 
Through glades of steel, they stripped away our sickest 

while we stood in line. 



One judgment day was done with. So your transport 

took us down your stream; 
Your raw recruits of life, to go where snow peaks glow, 

where rapids gleam, 
Past Greenwich, Sheerness, out to sea we steamed. We 

left the Foreland light. 
We lost the Lizard. Suddenly to England gone we said 

goodnight. 
And winds and waves were shaping us to stand or fall 

in England's fight. 

From fog, from steerage slime we came. One sunset's 
flames lit Newfoundland, 
130 



EMIGRANTS 131 

Our babes, our women, open-eyed saw land draw near on 

either hand, 
They fed us through their mill again at Montreal. We 

caught the cars. 
And fast and faster rolled away to where the mountains 

meet the stars. 

They spilled us o'er the prairie floor at sidings lone, 

Saskatchewan 
Took toll of us. Alberta more. But still our strongest 

hearts held on, 
Till our last truck had topped the grade. We clanking 

faster forth to sea 
Like batteries hurled down to battle, found new frontiers 

of destiny. 

The mountain's province and the coast had called us to 
their firing line. 

All England and the White Man's host to reinforce. 
Where yonder pine 

Towers two hundred feet above the pass, our viking chil- 
dren play 

Clear eyed, surefooted, strong of hand, to save your slaves 
of yesterday. 

Your ulcer cities in the east that eat the white man's 
strength away. 



132 EMIGRANTS 

Our fathers held our Northland hills and woods, and ruled 
her restless sea. 

And South, and West and East they went and carved your 
charts whose hearts were free, 

Numidia sacked, Byzantium and Asia scourged. Our 
sons today 

Before the yellow legions come with long ships westward 
shall away. 

Till in the final war of all, down from the pole, around 
the world, flying like eagles to the feast, 

Shades of old Vikings sentries call our Northland squad- 
rons sunset hurled, their airship arrows aiming east. 

S.S, Scotian, ^-2^-1 3 



THE OPEN QUESTION 



THE OPEN QUESTION 

WHEN I am dead and gone, sweetheart, this restless 
vrorld shall be 
A little darker, emptier, more drear, a little space; 
Till life that gave you grace to love shall teach your eyes 

to see 
A little more, a moment dear, before they fill your place. 

And if I knew the end of all, the hour my light went out; 
Tomorrow or tonight maybe — you wonder what I'd do; 
And should I march alone to death and meet him with a 

shout ; 
Or should I shudder here at home and creep and cling to 

you? 

You could not love a coward, dear, if war were round our 

walls. 
And war is ever round the world, and all God's soldiers 

go 
Up to the last grim firing line, and each in order falls. 
I could not love your life alone, nor mine, to lose it so. 

Tonight may be the end of all. And after, no one knows. 
I cannot hide my candle end and hoard for us alone. 
When souls are sinking in the storm, from every gust that 

blows 
The God in me that must attain, this talent still my own. 

135 



136 THE OPEN QUESTION 

And if the end is near or far, and if we live or die 
Beyond the blackness, matters not so long as in your 

sight 
I have stood up unterrified; and learned to testify 
To all the million flames of God that mount to meet the 

night. 

New York, ii-ig-12 



SURVIVAL 

LIFE'S procession, starting, struggling, whence and 
how and why and where ; 
Out of sea ooze, out of ether, out of night, that stair by 

stair. 
Climbs to light; that suddenly is lost in darkness and 
despair: 



Those we love that out of shadows, from the blackness of 

the womb, 
From the mists of distance drifting, limned with light 

against the gloom, 
Grow so near and warm and dear, until the midnight 

makes their tomb: 

All the march of men that started in slow atoms from the 

sea, 
Fast and faster strives today to disappear eternally ; 
To its sea cliff sweeps. And then like all those others must 

we be? 

All the march of man, the millions shouldered nearer to 

the pit, 
Selling life for threadbare hours of toil and slumber, slow, 

unfit. 
Starving, sick, blind, shuddering, to the black tide of night 

submit. 

137 



138 SURVIVAL 

At that sea cliff's edge the strong, the shrewd, the brave, 

the tried, the true; 
All that urged our life along, the souls that held their stars 

in view; 
All that met life with a song and smiled at death, must 

vanish too. 

But the multitudes are building, hour b)^ hour and year by 

year. 
Piers, approaches, to the pit, the ford, the strait. They 

disappear. 
So the corals conquered ocean ; so men bring new manhood 

near. 

Underground and under ocean, under air and under soul. 
Men are toiling, building, making piers and stairs. Each 

human mole 
Caged in caissons, drives his tunnel towards the spirit's 

path and goal. 

Men are toiling, men are making piers and bridges, mo- 
tors, wings. 

Airships soar and lift our eyes and hearts to dream diviner 
things. 

Lonely scouts of science lead us toward the truth tomorrow- 
brings. 



SURVIVAL 139 

Here a surgeon, here a chemist, scales and holds his moun- 
tain height; 

Reaches out and lifts the race another inch from death 
and night: 

Dies and goes to scale his snow peaks, stars and mountain 
tops of light. 

Others delving deeper still in souls of men life's essence 

see. 
Wireless messages of love they code, till immortality 
Is made a motor state of mind and the first function of the 

free. 

New York, 6-1-12 



HEART OF FIRE 

WE made a fire place In the night, 
A house of life to keep us warm. 
We made a home to hold our light 
Through hours of darkness, cold and storm. 

And there before our hearth we sit. 
And visions there and dreams of gold 
We share, while sparks like seconds flit, 
And hour by hour our youth grows cold. 

So hold me close and closer here ; 
While like two faggots, one clear flame 
Our moment makes immortal, dear ; 
And radiant; (For this cause we came, 

Out of the atoms where the stars 
Are sparks that fade and night is long.) 
And listen! till in fiery bars 
A fallen forest leaps to song. 

Its golden lilt and lullaby 
Is like your happy heart, that clings 
To glories gleaned in days gone by. 
And fancies from forgotten springs: 

A fallen forest of the years. 
We heap its embers here tonight 
140 



HEART OF FIRE 141 

Till in the heart of fire appears 
All loveliness that lives in light. 

It leaps, it lures, it wreathes your lips 
With spirit kisses, till your eyes 
Are fires that laugh at love's eclipse, — 
And flaming swords of Paradise. — 
Till slowly from my fingers slips 
A loveliness that never dies. 

Pe conic, 4-21-ij 



THE LAST VISTA 

OVER the hills the vista lay 
Unexplored, till the rain today 
Woke in me sombre and savage unrest ; 
Till over the crest of the hill I pressed. 

Camps of my dreams w^here dawn was red 
On a world of wonder's watershed, 
All were ended. The world grew dim 
In a valley gray and a daylight grim. 

Life is a limbo of lies, I thought. 
Where the bravest vision is brought to naught 
And we follow its vistas vague, in vain, 
Into midnight's mist and the restless rain. 

And the years they trick us ; and one by one 
They steal our dreams till the last is done. 
So I doubted. But soon, rny dear, 
Your hands on my eyelids lay warm and near. 

" Follow me forward and fast," you cried, 
"And look when I let you." Open eyed 
I saw your lips and the laughter there, 
And a star like a gem that graced your hair: 

That a hand in the night had suddenly set 
Barely above you. Men forget 
142 



THE LAST OF VISTA 143 

The rain of the stars where night and day 
We and our world are whirled away; 

And the playmate tender and tried and true; 
Death and your lover, who comes to you, 
Leads you a little, and lets you see 
The best of your dreams that is yet to be. 

New York, 12-12-12 



SANCTUARY 

TO her empty house today 
Like a gray deserted shrine, 
From Broadway I turn away 
To my spirit's bread and wine. 

Here Boldini painted her 
When the century began: 
Felt one honest impulse stir ; 
For one hour was more than man. 

Mother, he came close to you, 
Caught the truth your eyes conceived, 
On your lips its summons knew, 
For one hour in life believed. 

I have sinned to snatch success, 
And my heart is hard and old. 
All my millions make me less. 
All my wisdom makes me cold. 

I shall toil until the end. 
One by one, where none can know. 
Wife and work, and faith and friend 
Last of all your love shall go. 

Darkness ends our dying eyes. 
In my weakness here I cleave 
144 



SANCTUARY 145 

To the old eternal lies. 
For one hour I would believe : 

Where life lauds her king of kings; 
There your spirit on her knees, 
Whispers still eternal things; 
Out of eyes immortal sees. 

Port Said, 2-19-14 



MARKING TIME 

LIFE, my lad, is one long wait, after another. Soon 
or late 

You'll run up against this rock, or a slimier, slower 
shock. 

Mud or sand that clogs the Road. If you're wise you'll 
shift your load. 

Poetize, philosophize. One each weary sinew tries ; 

Armor, motor, grit or brain. One sees brother souls in 
pain. 

Fallen from life's firing-line; tells himself, "This chance 
is mine ; 

From my task this tithe to take; in another's eyes to 
wake 

Faith reborn and manhood stark, mightier than the shore- 
less dark." 

One at stragglers swears; or sings; cowards back to tri- 
umph brings. 

Life, my dear, is dark with pain. Light casts shadow. 
Heart and brain, 

Flesh and soul through travail pangs win their own. 
Your city clangs, 

God's grim anvil. Hammers beat, to the tune that end- 
less feet 

Since Creation's dawn began to repeat, the March of 
Man; 



146 



MARKING TIME 147 

Lilting to the pulse of life. Honor's pilgrims, Love and 

Strife, 
Lead our leaders. Here we stay, while they wrestle by 

the way. 

Some shall stray. Life's soldier halts. Though he swears 

at some one's faults, 
From his ranks he never breaks till the Word the column 

shakes. 
Or a bullet brings release. Life is war. The paths of 

peace 
Lead through pleasant places till some one breaks the 

truce. And still 
Through the love outlasting joy, babes are born and girl 

and boy 
God's last broken ranks renew. And the black battalions 

too 
Night by night their slaves recruit. Life's a fight, or lust 

and loot. 



Life's a wave that comes and goes. Life's a wind that lulls 

and blows. 
Life's breath, a laugh, a sigh. Life's a journey till we 

die; 
Days our mile posts, white or gray; nights their shadows. 

Now, today, 



148 MARKING TIME 

Life's an endless mountain climb. Though you've halted, 

marking time ; 
Lovelier vistas one by one, larger light from sun to sun, 
Older soldiers w^in for you. Mist and murk obscured 

your view. 
Strangling wreaths of battle smoke. That was nothing. 

Then you woke. 
Death was done. For life's a fight, on forever up to 

Light. 

New York, 4-22-12 



THE SOUL HUNTER 

WE sought life between the suns and ranging far 
through starless night, 
Out of chaos swarmed to form, and out of blindness groped 

to sight. 
We went seeking through the ages. Wasting aeons wore 

away 
One by one the husks that hid the heat that warmed our 

wasting clay; 
Till man, naked, from his caves came creeping to the light 

of day. 



Life through travail pangs of planets, bore his body, made 

it strong; 
Out of weakness wrought his wisdom. Glacial pressure 

hard and long 
Held him close to lava fires until his brain blazed forth in 

light; 
Till red fear had forced him forth to war with cold and 

storm and night; 
Fears that filled his eyes, his ears, and forced his shaking 

hands to fight. 

He made gods of fear and shadows; gods unsparing and 

unknown ; 
Gods of greed and lust and hatred; gods with hearts and 

hands of stone; 

149 



I50 THE SOUL HUNTER 

Gods of all that crushed and scourged and gnawed without 
him and within; 

Gods of sickness, gods of sorrow, gods of darkness breed- 
ing sin; 

Gods of life that thrust him forth to light, a larger life to 
win. 

Gods of tenderness, that failed him; gods of hope that 

heard his prayer ; 
Gods of pity that betrayed him; gods of love that let 

despair 
Leave its world for lost, and shrinking in the night hold 

one sick soul, 
As a mother holds one child, worth all the world. And 

while he stole 
For a slave's slow spirit strength ; all men w^ere marching 

to their goal. 

Miser souls one altar candle watched in fear; and sud- 
denly 

Life that lends the suns to space and sends new light to 
eyes that see. 

Lifted up the mind of man to stars unborn he certifies ; 

Set men sounding life's last depth ; and taught our surgeons 
to devise 

Scalpels new that death's dark heart dissect, till truth is 
torn from lies. 



THE SOUL HUNTER 151 

Once man sought his soul in darkness as a babe is born in 
pain. 

Now man's manhood leaps to light like search lights stab- 
bing storm and rain ; 

Reaching out to wider service ; toiling on eternity ; 

Dying, giving something living, larger life more fit to be ; 

To one soul of all the world, that cell by cell from hell 
goes free. 

New York, y-ii-14 



TOMORROW 

I WOKE from dreams of him today. I heard 
Beyond these four close cage-like walls, the sum- 
mons of a bird 

Into the garden's fragrance and the breath before the 
dawn. 

Then from the womb of morning and the doors of death 
withdrawn, 

Another life, another light, leapt forth to quicken the 
earth and sky; 

Another April day was born too wonderful, too fair to 
die. 

" David is dead," they told me yesterday. 

At twilight I looked out at death. And these dim hillsides 
gray 

Where once we walked in splendor were like ashes of the 
earth. 

Today he lives in me once more. The spring, the sun- 
light's birth 

Are nature's tongues to tell me that his life could not be 
lost. 

And then the birds began to come. How^ many leagues of 
air they crossed, 

How many miles of land and seas their tireless questing 
carried here, 

Back to our garden's apple trees to nest and breed another 



year! 



S2 



TOMORROW 153 

David has gone but only gone before. 
Our souls are birds of passage that must fly forever more 
Across the weary seas of space from star to farther star. 
And shall w^e not come back again to where our gardens 

are, 
Our homes, our children's children, in this little nest of 

earth 
In our corner of God's garden, where the planets leap to 

birth 
Like His flowers of flame forever; and where the meteors 

all 
Fade like petals of perfection through the spirit's spring 

and fall? 

Had he only left me children — but the children of his 

dreams 
I shall bear and rear and care for ; till our home, our garden 

seems 
Just a tryst of life, of spirit memories that never die; 
Birds of passage year by year that April's radiance glorify. 
Whether comes a happier lover, larger life to me to give; 
Or at heart a widow ever, I in other children live. 
All he was and willed, undying, I shall cherish till I see 
Eyes and lips that laughing, crying, David's love bring 

back to me. 

S.S^ Friedrich der Grosse, g-4-12 



PRACTICAL PEOPLE 

YOU have lost beauty and delight and worlds of won- 
der wild and real. 
You have forgotten everything the child and savage see 

and feel. 
You wrap your thoughts in threadbare words. The blur- 
ring types of your machine 
Your feelings faint in faded patterns print, your starless 
nights between. 



For truth eternal, naked, new as sunrise or a baby's smile, 
Your hearts too hard to tremble to, hide in some dusty 

letter file. 
Your minds are mirrors of the streets, your eyes in ledgers 

lost, survey. 
Like columns to be added through, year after year, each 

sordid day. 

Your feet in coffins black have died to the fresh touch of 

turf and dew. 
Your hands that here typewriters plied too long, lose hold 

of life. To you 
Joy that with jewels threads each hour, that makes a 

miracle supreme 
Of every weed and wayside flower, is dead as yesterday's 

dead dream. 



154 



PRACTICAL PEOPLE 155 

When comes a voice to vitalize blood that o'er mountains 

used to run? 
What vision serves to quicken eyes that saw huge seas 

that drowned the sun? 
What message stirs the ears that heard the sea peaks 

splintered, undismayed ? 
What warmth shall light the embers cold that into silence 

fall and fade? 



You shun the sunlight who the air of heaven in houses 

dark defile, 
You have forgotten gladness there; to run, to wrestle, 

shout and smile. 
Adventure clamors at your gates. You shut her out 

where comfort crawls. 
You hump your back above your books. You waste your 

lives in rotting walls. 

For you have made of printer's ink a serpent in whose 

paper coils 
Your souls are crushed. You hide away the wealth that 

stifles, wastes, and spoils. 
All heaven and earth you use today to drown yourselves 

in dollar bills. 
When will you ever stop to play with morning marching 

up the hills? 



156 PRACTICAL PEOPLE 

When will your bloodless spirits guess the wonder in one 

grain of sand, 
One spark of fire; the tenderness in one girl's smile, one 

child's warm hand; 
The rapture in one robin's song, one rose, one moonrise 

after rain? 
You who to blackness here belong, can souls like yours be 

born again? 

Peconic, N. Y., ^-22-14 



TOY LAND 

THERE'S a little Jew cash girl that comes and 
stares 
At my toys for little near-millionaires, 
Motor cars, battleships, aeroplanes, 
That you wind with a key, every day that it rains. 
When she looks at the dolls it's like saying your prayers. 

Mimi from Paris the star of the show 
Squeaks out her name when one squeezes her, so. 
Now if I was one of that high brow bunch 
Of better than thou dames, I've got a hunch 
I'd have bought her for Becky a long time ago. 

I've got a snap shot. Say, wouldn't she be 
Fuller of joy than a bird on a tree? 
Maybe the tips of her toes wouldn't sing. 
There was a kiddie got hers here last spring; 
Kissed the doll blind. Then she tried to kiss me. 

Now it's December and hell's here to stay 
Three blessed weeks. Folks ain't Christians today. 
People like sheep keep forgetting the Child; 
Till the mob starts to make a good and runs wild ; 
And the rush in our aisles would scare any subway. 



157 



158 TOYLAND 

Heaven's a fairy tale. Last night I dreamed 

There was toyland in heaven where star drop lights 

gleamed 
On women, that prayed for girl babies and boys, 
The way little Becky wants dollies and toys. 
There were sales-lady angels — so silly it seemed. 

Peconic, y-^i-14 



PAW 



T 



THE CANCER WARD 

HEY nurse their bullets in their breasts where 
babies' blissful lips have hung. 

On cheeks that lovers' lips caressed, the livid w^ounds of 
life lie bare. 

In eyes that harbored happiness, where pain has long out- 
lived despair, 

The last dumb terror of the brute that lurks and wakes 
and slumbers there. 

Draws near to death and cannot die ; and murders prayer. 
You too were young. 



Poets have sung to you perhaps. Your lover's prayers 

you once disdained. 
But you were pure and pitiful and perfect as the drifted 

snow 
That hides a little garden plot, the ward's last window 

far below. 
Where winter prunes his roses red. And you were born 

the brute to know 
That masters man, and makes of him a spirit stained, that 

earth has chained. 

A drunkard beat you on the breast. A saint has touched 

your finger tips. 
A hero's hands your heart have pressed. For you have 

lived and you have learned 
i6i 



1 62 THE CANCER WARD 

Of joy and pain to savor life. And you have languished, 

you have yearned, 
And you have thrilled through ecstasies. And you have 

snatched at joys unearned. 
And you till dust to dust returned, have smiled with true 

and trembling lips. 

Brave heart behind the sheeted screen: dull lives that still 
to ashes fall: 

Plesh where one cinder eating all, one throbbing ache for 
all you lost, 

Alone alive, forswears the prayers a nursing sister breathes 
acrost 

A gulf as great as Dives saw: the fire of life your em- 
bers cost; 

You who were rich and radiant: you who like Lazarus 
lost all. 



No heaven hereafter waits for you. In life alone is your 

reward. 
But beauty wavers in one smile that meets the weary 

watcher's eyes. 
And loveliness may waken love as strong as life that never 

dies. 
A second's sick surcease from pain has made a poignant 

paradise. 



THE CANCER WARD 163 

And out of horror springs a hope; and healing brings 
from things abhorred. 

The armies of the nations march: the singers of the na- 
tions see; 

The surgeons of the nations hear in pain a life that 
labors long; 

Till master minds of science find its antitoxins sure and 
strong: 

Till suffering a symphony is made, a mighty marching 
song: 

Till from the spirit's agonies is born the better day to be. 

Paris, 5-11-1^ 



CHRIST IN THE ASYLUM 

THE long excursion train has stopped and slowly 
through the snow, 
Through Sunday morning's holiness of woods and hills 

they go; 
The black procession of the poor, to see their sick to- 
day. 
Some carry tawdry Christmas gifts. Some dumb lips 
try to pray. 



For Christ has come to Hades here, to herd with the 

insane. 
Since we evict Him from the Church and crown Him 

from the brain. 
Our modern minds His faith forget. But here are hearts 

as old 
As hunger, pain and horror, and hopelessness and cold. 

The winter sun between the bars as merciless as time 
Betrays the faces marred and scarred, reveals the years' 

gray grime; 
The women old that God forgot, that man has wasted 

here, 
The faces of defeat and death, the eyes of endless fear. 

One plucks a rose to pieces. One stooping, squinting 
crone 

164 



CHRIST IN THE ASYLUM 165 

Who wears a rag bag on her back, grins at a grama- 
phone, 

One hugs a squalid doll and whines, and watches hours 
that were, 

When laughter and all loveliness her children shared 
with her. 

O mad Madonna of the slums that some one loved and 

lost ; 
Gray ghosts and failures of us all: O souls success has 

cost; 
There runs a whisper through the wards to lighten lives 

forlorn. 
Today of some dead prostitute a child to us is born. 

Today the foul, the piteous, the shyster and the shrew, 
With remnants of life's bargain sales make offerings to 

you. 
They fill this fester spot with flowers. They make their 

morgue a shrine. 
For they are pilgrims poor of love, that lost is still 

divine. 

Kind's Park, L. I., 12-28-12 



MILL CHILDREN 

WE have forgotten how to sing. Our laughter Is 
a godless thing: listless and loud and shrill and 
sly. 
We have forgotten how to smile. Our lips, our voices 

are too vile. For each of us, a living lie, 
Each old, each cold, each carnal face is childhood's death 
and black disgrace. We all are dead before we die. 

Our mothers' mothers made us so. The fathers that we 
never know, in blindness and in wantonness, 

Caused us to come to question you. What is it that you 
others do, that profit so by our distress? 

If all your millions made the mill, why is It then that 
never still it murders us, both day and night? 

You and your little children sleep. We and our mothers 
vigil keep. You cheated us of all delight. 

Ere our sick spirits came to birth you made our fair 
and fruitful earth, a nest of pestilence and blight. 

Your black machines are never still, and hard, relent- 
less as your will, they card us like the cotton waste. 

And flesh and blood more cheap than they, they seize and 
eat and shred away, to feed the fever of your haste. 

For we are waste and shoddy here, who know no god, no 
faith but fear; no happiness, no hope but sleep. 
i66 



MILL CHILDREN 167 

Half imbecile and half obscene we sit and tend each tense 
machine, too sick to sigh, too tired to weep, 

Until the tortured end of day, when fevered faces turn 
away, to see the stars from blackness leap. 

Hardest of all is this to bear, that somewhere in the upper 
air, there may be heaven we never know. 

Beyond the blackness children may from dreams of love 
look up to-day to hear their mothers whisper low. 

But here the mill's unbending roar, calls us and curses 
more and more, God's curse on men who know 
Him not. 

And night and morn to the Most High, we march 
God's conscripts born to die, till love at last 
makes bright our lot : 

Till in the shapes of filth and fear that you have starved 
and stolen here, you find the children God for- 
got. 

Peconic, p-i8-i^ 



GUTTER SLIME 

WE are your wounds. 
We are j'our fevers and festering sores, and your 

failures and faults; 
Sick in field hospitals, stragglers, camp followers foul, 

where life's long column halts; 
Where your cities are camps, treasure heaps of the ages 

you looted, of earth that your strong men despoil. 
And you sit on their summits. We creep round the 

edges and snarl at your sentinels. Starving we 

toil. 

We are defeat. 

We are the danger, the germs in the street, in the food 

that you eat at your ease. 
We are disease that is lying in wait for the weak, for 

your children. We faint and we freeze. 
We drink and we fall in the gutters. We crawl in 

the gutters. We crawl and we fall where you 

left us to crawl and fall. 
And the drink and the drugs that you sell us shall surfeit 

you too till you pay for us all. 

We are despair. 

We are past prayer. We are horror that hopelessly 

shudders and dies in the dark; 
Hunger and hate and black shame that comes back to 

you making its mark, 
i68 



GUTTER SLIME 169 

Blasting your sons; the sick pain of dumb beasts, and 

strong sorrow gone mad. 
We are your weakness you waste. Shall we ever look 

up at last, learn to be glad? 

We are your goal. 

For your soul that you starve, when you starve us shall 

cease to be blind. 
And your mind that you madden with haste, something 

mightier shall find 
Than the money that crushes us down, that distorts, that 

shall cripple you too. 
Till you learn to believe in the least of us, serving a 

gospel made new. 
We are your God in the germ, till we suffer and struggle 

with you, 
Out of the slime to make soul. 

Peconic, g-ip-i^ 



CJMP FOLLOPVERS 

ONCE we were as you were, children, cherished, 
prayed for, born to bless; 
Bought with pain and labor lasting, white as April snow 

is white; 
Fragrant as a bed of roses, living lips of happiness 
Moulded by a mother's kisses; eyes of laughter and 

delight. 
But that beauty faded early as the snowflakes in the 
night. 

Once we were as you were, women, beasts of burden for 

the race; 
Slaves by caves and cords imprisoned till our masters 

dared to sleep. 
So we bore them stronger warriors, found a surer hiding 

place. 
And the flame of life flashed upward and the ape forgot 

to creep, 
And the mothers of our mothers learned at last to love 

and weep. 

Once we walked in folk migrations, once with emperors 
we rode; 

Mistresses of mighty monarchs ordering the world's ad- 
vance. 

Once we taught all art to triumph, in your temples we 
abode. 

170 



CAMP FOLLOPVERS 171 

Once we smiled at minnie-singers, ordered love to lift 

his lance, 
Setting armored squadrons spurring at a whisper or a 

glance. 

Once we were like flames devouring flinging men across 

the sea, 
Licking gold from Montezumas ; gold that we divide 

today 
With the men that death subduing share their spoils with 

you and me — 
You the nun, the saint, the matron ; you the wife he 

hides away; 
You his body bearing children; I his mind to mount and 

play. 

You may pray in guarded houses. We go following his 

camps^ — 
For us both he fights and triumphs. We have shared 

his sorest need. 
Through the deserts pioneering, where defeat his ashes 

stamps. 
Still his farthest watch fires sharing we shall nurse with 

hands that bleed 
Sinking flames of life that falter. Deeper in his heart 

we read. 



172 CAMP FOLLOWERS 

You despise us, you abhor us. But you copy us today, 
Wear our dresses, learn our dances, paint your flesh that 

we despise, 
Like our own. In turn your children one by one we 

lure away. 
And each lonely lost street walker of the nations in our 

eyes 
Is a sentinel of heaven's host advancing to the skies. 

New York, 1-15-12 



THE BREAD LINE 

WHEN winter has besieged the world with want 
and storm and snow, 
And hail like bullets sweeps the street, and winds begin 

to blow 
Like roaring ranks of ruin loud at twilight: Corporal 

Cold 
And Captain Hunger line us up, sick boys and men as 

old 
As the dead hopes that once we hugged, the ghosts of 

loves we sold. 



For some of us, the happy ones, this is the last review; 
The last inspection of a life. This brother, man, is 

you; 
This hulk that coughs his heart, his hope, his heaven, 

his hell away. 
For you whose god lies lapped in lace, whose harlot's 

hands betray 
All manhood; here, when midnight strikes, tonight is 

judgment day. 

For cold shall search us pore by pore; each cell that sin 

has tried, 
That pain and fear and sickness scourged, that hunger 

•crucified. 
It stiffens us. In rigid ranks we shuffle, marking time, 

173 



174 THE BREAD LINE 

Till from your church where Christ is cold, there sounds 

a silver chime. 
Till one by one, our rations drawn, the slum takes back 

its slime. 



But even so for some of us whose souls are sinking here, 
There comes a glow that heats the heart through frozen 

hours of fear. 
A vision floats and forms for us through bar room fumes, 

and where 
Your coppers club us into holes where sewage fills the 

air. 
Where vice and vermin eat us up; you too who drove us 

there. 

We see you on your sick beds then, your sons and 

daughters too, 
Drawing near to fear, to midnight, to the Devil's dread 

review. 
And you rave and cry for rations, drops of drugs, a 

woman's tears 
As slowly strained, lost words of love. That vision 

disappears 
While we shuffle through the snow drifts and the seconds 

slow as years. 



THE BREAD LINE 175 

For the armies of Messiah march unresting day and night, 
Out of darkness, from the jungles, from your cities up 

to light. 
Out of hospitals, from sweat shops, out of dive and mine 

and mill, 
Spent and wasted we are marching past the last frontiers 

of will, 
Where the last grim Surgeon sifts us; where you shrink 

and shudder still. 

S.S. Chicago, 4-13-13 



THE LOCK-STEP 

THERE'S the warden's little toddler at a window 
in the sun, 
Looking down and laughing at us as we pass him one 

by one. 
And I wonder if he wonders why we never stride or run. 



There are tears and cries and anguish when a baby comes 

to birth; 
When he breaks his way from prison. He may murder 

all your mirth, 
He may kill your best and dearest, yet you yield him all 

the earth. 

And he stumbled as we stumbled. And he trembles as 

he tries 
To come closer to his mother, till his eyes adore her 

eyes. 
And you lift him when he's crawling till he's looking at 

the skies. 

If he's soiled and hurt and hungry, he is dearer to her 

then, 
Dearer since in her he suffers. We were babies more 

than men. 
And we blundered forth to freedom till j^ou beat us back 

again. 

176 



THE LOCK-STEP 177 

You are children. You are cruel. Yesterday you had 

to crawl. 
Out of mud the ages made us. And today a bar, a 

wall, 
Is the only thing that damns us and divides us from you 

all. 

We are conscripts of consumption and perdition, drawn 

by lot, 
That you drill and waste and murder in your barracks 

black that rot. 
We are fear you make your fetish, wounded souls your 

faith forgot. 

Make your prisons of tomorrow a white hospital of 

life. 
Here today is Satan's cloister. Here you sharpen every 

knife. 
Here you hide the black byproducts of your greed and 

lust and strife. 

You go limping through a lockstep long as ours. But 

this we know: 
Hopes forlorn of life go creeping till its black Bastile 

shall go, 
Till our bodies fill the ditch, our wrongs its walls shall 

overthrow. 



178 THE LOCK-STEP 

And the warden's baby watching us is wiser far than 
you 

For he knows light kindles light. He smiles and some 
of us smile too. 

For he knows that life is lovely — life our murdered boy- 
hood knew. 

Los Angeles, 1^-24-13 



IN HOSPITAL 

BECAUSE my mother's blood was thin, 
My father, life's young spendthrift, I. 
The child of sickness old as sin, 
Here year by year in prison lie. 

We have a chapel, white and still, 
A nunnery whose litanies 
In pain's long service swell and thrill ; 
And I am weary, Lord, of these. 

Pain was my sister. Silently 
I hugged her to my baby breast. 
Until I learned her smile to see 
As closer still her child she pressed. 

Today her fingers come and go. 
They numb my pulses, as the night 
Weighs down the noon. I never know 
The wonders of your world of light. 

I see the sheeted bodies pass, 
To life's last altar, or the place 
Where the white surgeons say their mass. 
And break life's body for the race. 

This is our sacrifice for fear 
And blindness. I have lived to see 
179 



i8o IN HOSPITAL 

How some of us must suffer here 
To make tomorrow's millions free: 

Till death's last anaesthetic gray 
Shall slowly drift and dissipate, 
Till unseen surgeons lift away 
All pain, and crooked souls are straight. 

Peconic, 3-13-14 



THE OLD 

PARIS lay in the moonlight, Paris asleep and white, 
Till across the court of my hotel I heard a cough 
in the night. 
Horrible, hoarse, and choking, like the voice of death 

that lags 
When the mind is blind, and the soul is sick, and furled 

its battle flags: 
And life is a slow surrender, and the flesh is torn to 
rags. 

Life is a slow surrender at last for every one. 

They steal the light of day from us, and the splendor 

of the sun. 
And each breath that we draw, draws nearer, coughing 

or crooning slow, 
The old, old songs that we used to sing in the sunlight 

long ago. 
To the darkness, and the silence, and the end that none 

can know. 



Life is a slow surrender to the legions of the years: 
All that we worked and wept for once, at last the urge 

of tears. 
Strength of the hand, and muscles like armies drilled to 

die. 
All melodies that fill the ear, all flowers that thrill the 

eye, 

i8i 



1 82 THE OLD 

Beauty of waves and women, noon ; midnight and morn- 
ing's sky: 

Scent of pale violets in the woods, of new mown hay and 

brine, 
All savor of our daily bread, all wonder waked in wine, 
Warmth of our children's kisses, clasping of clinging 

hands: 
All these Thy gifts, we give Thee, Lord, who learn Thy 

law's commands. 
Till sick and old and shivering the soul a beggar stands. 

We lay upon Thy altar, Lord, a friend's last loving 

smile, 
A love's last letter, memories of gold that gleam awhile, 
Of all things glad and tender, of all things fair and 

true. 
Life is a slow surrender of all we dream and do: 
Till the last pale embers smoulder cold, and the last 

frail hour wears through. 

Life that to this year's living devotes each spring gone 
by 

That gave us all, who giving our lives, at rest shall lie : 
Life is a slow surrender of all our outworks. Still 



THE OLD 183 

We hold one citadel of thought, whose starving souls 
still thrill 

To triumphs new, new battles fought by thought im- 
mortal wrought of will. 

Peconic, 6-6-14 



BLIND 

YOU look at shadows all your lives, a world of 
shadows. Once I saw 
The shifting surfaces of things, the masks that men and 

women wear. 
The rags of beauty long outworn, whose flesh has failed, 

where greed and care 
Have made all little things of life the sordid letters of 
its law. 



Once all was agony. The light like life itself went day 
by day. 

Blind panic died. I tried to make a million records, could 
not choose 

Out of the world that slipped from me, the last to see, 
the last to loose. 

Till like an abscess lanced, the worst with the last day- 
light went away. 

Since I had lost myself in light and freedom that you 

waste as well; 
In my black prison cell for life I stumbled, groping 

maimed and sore. 
I w^recked my soul against the wall. I went on falling 

through the floor 
Into the void whose heart reveals that heaven is here 

as near to hell, 

184 



BLIND 185 

As light and shadow. I was lost. I clutched at what 

was nearest. Long 
I clung to kindness, to the hands whose clasp brought 

back my friends to me. 
I felt the love I once forgot, I was too close to, once, 

to see. 
I heard it till I knew at last, each word of welcome was 

a song. 

So I began to give myself. Once I had taken, wasted 

all. 
Since I had nothing else to give, I gave my greetings 

snatched from pain. 
And trembling smiles, till people brought their trials to 

me. And once again 
I have a world for working in. Today it claims me when 

I call. 



We see the stars at night alone. Its shadows pale illusion 

sends. 
From sunrise to the dusk of day, to veil all vital things. 

At last 
From my close cloister of despair, from one gray, wasted 

world I passed, 
Into another where I see the spirit faces of my friends. 



1 86 BLIND 

The soul of beauty still is mine; that mothers feel but 

cannot say, 
When first their first-born's lips they press; like sound 

beyond all symphonies. 
And all the awful vast of space is lit with living stars 

like these, 
Till all the pain that mars His face dies as God's shadows 

die today. 

Peconic, ^-14-14 



PEOPLE 



COMMUTERS 

THE western window of their world was open wide 
to heaven today, 
Till eight o'clock slammed down the shade and trains 

went whirling them away. 
The morning papers poisoned dawn, with rape and murder, 

greed and lies. 
They saw the city from the ferry; the altars high of 

sacrifice, 
Where beauty strives < with steel and granite, and men 

of slime make merchandise. 



New hopes and fair ambitions there were written round 

their lips in light. 
And strangers marched as brothers, where young loves 

touched finger tips at sight. 
They saw a road of glory laid across the tide-way for 

an hour. 
They vanished in the shadows slowly where cliffs of 

windows blindly tower, 
Where greed's slow ambuscades are lurking, and men 

must pay their price for power. 

Blithe feet on furtive errands went and gracious fingers 

ruin wrote. 
From discontent to discontent they grew. Harsh note 

on harsher note, 

189 



I90 COMMUTERS 

The ferry whistles through the fog outroared the clamor 

of the cars. 
Young eyes grew sordid and despairing and eager spirits 

chafed their bars, 
While men and masters of tomorrow built up their city 

towards the stars. 



Day after day and year on year they were besieged until 

they died, 
By office shadows, by the streets where life is cursed and 

crucified. 
And boyhood's dreams were smeared with mud. One 

gave her youth and ten their tears; 
Life seemed to some a barren service. And they were 

starved of prayers and fears, 
That women for their children cherish who triumph o'er 

their iron years. 

The charge wins home within our w^alls, and catapult 

and mangonel 
On trembling platforms creak and strain, around our 

island citadel. 
Like haggard women once in Greece whose bleeding 

fingers wrought amain. 
From their own hair the bowstring's plaiting while boys 

snatched arrows from the slain 



COMMUTERS 191 

That dying, fighting men might glory in Athens born in 
light again: 

Their millions pale to battle march when daylight ends 

the truce of God. 
His splendor through His loopholes see at dawn and 

twilight. Heads that nod 
At noon in languor, may not know the charges and the 

counter-calls. 
But deathlessness is in their dreaming and strength in 

every tear that falls, 
To stay this city's soul, that kneeling from battle builds 

up reeling walls. 

S.S. Shidzuoka Maru, 1-18-14 



NINE O'CLOCK 

YOU housed and hid corruption: in darkness bred 
disease, 
You laid upon -the children your lusts and infamies. 
You starved them and you cheated their lives of all 

delight. 
You made the air of heaven a sickness in the night. 
You blinded them to beauty, their sunshine stole away, 
And still the children come to school to make you young 
today. 



And some are dumb to gladness, and some forget to 

smile, 
And some are vile and cruel, and some are tame and 

vile. 
And half of them are hungry, and faces foul and gray, 
Small ghosts of lives no woman loves go with them. 

They obey 
The old primeval evils, the old primeval pains 
That bore them and begat them, that fester in their 

veins. 

They are your want and weaknesses, the children of your 

greed. 
The price you pay for pleasure. By their sorrow you 

succeed. 
Their faces are your failures. In filth and gutter slime 

I02 



NINE O'CLOCK 193 

You slip with them and stumble through by-wajs black 

of time 
Whose fever and infection you harbor in your haste. 
And you that cheapen seconds here, tomorrow's aeons 

waste. 



But out of evil surges an urge to better things, 
And in their cries and curses a living spirit sings. 
And life that in the lifetime of stars we learn to weigh, 
Has made this school a block house of freedom for to- 
day. 
And here the children herding from the terrors in the 

night 
Look up and see one loophole that leads at last to light. 

Not yet, life's laboratories and armories of will. 

Our schools may win our war for us, for life to live 

must kill. 
And still in black battalions, the children passing by, 
Must struggle through these streets of shame where life 

to live must die. 
For this their mothers bore them, our raw recruits who 

are 
The armies of the broken road we build from star to 

star. 

Los Angeles J 11-4-13 



THE WIRETAPPER 

OUT of the dark when the streets are still, through 
a city that sleeps, in its hive of stone, 
When night is a smoke, where its swarms are laid ; 
Then rises a sound like a hammer of hoofs on the trail 

of the wires, a heart that's afraid, 
Pounding in terror, lost and alone. 

And it knocks and it knocks, like a soul that seeks, break- 
ing the locks, and the bounds of space. 

To leap to its own; till all longing dies. 

And quick as the click of a key, somewhere I can see 
despair in a woman's eyes, 

In the letters of death that my fingers trace. 

Out of the night where the ether thrills, and the heart 

of hills is a deathless dance, 
Of atoms that pulse to the lift of life. 
There comes an echo of worlds at war, of light and 

darkness locked in strife, 
Sweating the scum of circumstance. 

A child is born. And I watch by day, and into a slum 

while a gambler waits; 
I relay word of a horse that wins, 
From a stock exchange, where the greed of a race places 

its bets on a nation's sins. 
I preach the price of your lost estates. 

194 



THE WIRETAPPER 195 

My faith is filtered. No longer alone I knock on the 

wall of a cell in the night. 
My laboratory of life is stirred 
By the deep sea cables and wires, and the nerves of a 

sense that grows till all sound is heard, 
Like the lenses serving our larger sight. 

For once at college something I saw, a strange machine 

with its wires and rods 
And it measured pressures of mind and will. 
And here in the shadows I see the light. I trace life's 

records; when all is still, 
Register scales for the works of gods. 

Los Angeles, 11-21-13 



THE AIRMAN 

I WENT soaring through the sunshine, when the 
noon was hot and high. 
I rose in ranging spirals, like a maelstrom made to fly. 
I made my upper level, and I cut my motor free. 
And I catapulted down a mile. Then I began to be 
One free pulse of man's perfection and his larger liberty: 



And a thought of life incarnate in a boundless brain of 
blue. 

I rose throbbing through the silences, and clouds I 
clambered through; 

Till the twilight came acreeping as the tide sets back to 
land. 

From the night that still lay sleeping. I began to under- 
stand 

How men mount to me^t tomorrow from the ocean's 
slime and sand. 

To the sea cliffs, to the tree tops, to the snow peaks, on 

they came; 
Wave on wave of will and hunger, pulse on pulse of 

force and flame; 
Past the glaciers, past the lava, deserts, forests, faltered 

far. 
They left the night of jungles. They went steering by 

a star, 

196 



THE AIRMAN 197 

From those jungles, in the ether where lost suns like 
orchids are. 

These grew large when twilight loomed, when I had 
plumbed the curve of time : 

Endless spirals round the planets past dead tribes too 
tired to climb, 

Endless g)^res where eagles's pinions ghostly pathways 
pioneered, 

For high hearts that ride the whirlwind. To my soar- 
ing soul appeared 

All men made, and all their marching, till a trail to 
heaven they reared. 

All processionals of peril till our best began to be, 
Born of men that held the hills, and made their highways 

over sea. 
I was free in space forever. Then my essence thinned 

and failed ; 
Then my motor died, and faster flashing through the air 

I sailed; 
Fell through wider spirals still, till through earth's 

shadow slow I trailed. 

There was rest and food, and human hearts and hands, 
and help and heat. 



198 THE AIRMAN 

All our vital stores renewing, till our motor's tireless 
beat 

Dies beyond the daylight's limit, past the outer surf of 
air; 

We shall seek our new worlds out, to harbors new for- 
ever fare, 

Where man mounts to meet tomorrow; masters life for- 
ever there. 

S.S. Scotian, y-iS-ll 



THE SIGNAL TOWER 

I SEE the warp and woof of things cross and re- 
cross in strands of steel. 

I shift my levers one by one, my switches in the moon- 
light throw. 

I hold the keys of life and death. I master them today. 
I know 

My schedules as you know 3/our hand. My hands a 
giant keyboard feel, 

And more than music's harmonies the silences to me 
reveal. 



For my piano stretches far between two cities, thirty 
miles 

And more. I strike my chords across the big black sound- 
ing-box of night. 

I play them up. And rolling true, a mile a minute's 
blurr of light, 

The Limited goes flaming by. A woman at a window 
smiles, 

A forger sees success. A fool the dullness of his life 
reviles. 

A baby wakes. His mother's smile, her tense caress un- 
seen is mine. 

A lover sees his sweetheart near. A widow's heart brings 
home her dead. 

199 



200 THE SIGNAL TOfVER 

I break their motives with a jar. I halt them with a 

wreck ahead. 
I seize their thoughts that wander dazed, and breathless 

fear with faith combine; 
Then in a second's sure crescendo, I send them clanging 

down the line. 

By day I halt them here and there, my iron ritual enforce. 

I drill their souls undisciplined. I give and take the 
right of way. 

I am tomorrow's ministrant. My crossroad's altar of to- 
day 

They all pay tribute to; obey the hand I hold across their 
course ; 

The strongest and the weak as well. Against my will is 
no resource. 

And here in trembling and in fear I deal with life that 

leaps to me. 
For once one second saved a wreck. And every second 

death that lurks 
In fire and fog may break the leash I hold on him and 

all his works. 
And time will take his sacrifice. And greed and speed 

relentlessly, 
Must fling their children to the flames, that so the millions 

may go free. 



THE SIGNAL TOWER 201 

I serve the millions. Stronger hands than mine thrust 
back the specters stark. 

Blindfold I shuttle destinies. I send them on to ends un- 
known ; 

Strong soldiers of the centuries and lives that sink in 
shame alone. 

I set my semaphores, that men starting from sodden 
slumbers mark, 

Who by their living worship life that drives them blindly 
through the dark. 

Los Angeles, ii-i^-ij 



THE CONSTRUCTION GANG 

THEY caught us in the steerage when they brought 
us over sea; 
They tagged us with their tickets and they crowded us 

in cars; 
They rolled us to a railhead of an empire yet to be, 
One night beneath the stars. 

In the blackness of the bunkhouse we were waked before 

the dawn. 
And they gave us pick and crowbar, taught us how to 

heave and strike. 
Where across a dusty desert two thin strands of steel 

were drawn, 

Side by side and just alike. 

We went working through the sage brush where an ocean 
once went dry. 

In a country cursed with devils like the heavens over- 
head, 

And they burned to scattered clinkers saw-toothed moun- 
tains round the sky. 

Till the last dim cloud was dead. 

To the country of the cactus we came slowly day by 

day. 
Tie by tie we bound the levels, foot by foot we filled the 

grade ; 

202 



THE CONSTRUCTION GANG 203 

And we strained the sagging cables of a power house far 
away 

Up the road our hands had made. 

And the sand storms tried to blind us, and the winds 

like devils danced, 
Till the air was black at noonday. And the desert's 

maddened soul 
Rose to wrestle with our working and to rave. But we 

advanced 

Step by step, and grasped our goal. 

For our brothers came to meet us from the mountains 

and the sea. 
And we spliced the line at Summit; drove the spike that 

marked the end ; 
And we floated dow^n to Frisco where the barkeep mixes 

free, 

Just as long as luck's your friend. 

We put money on the tables and our manhood on the 

bars. 
We who made tomorrow nearer for the world that waits 

to ride. 
Till we straggled back from brothels to the open where 

the stars 

See the desert's doors flung wide. 

Los Angeles, ii-f-i^ 



THE LINESMAN 

CAN'T 5'0ii see them through the ages, smoking flares 
by lava lit, 

Waxen torches, Tyre and Sidon's galley lamps, that float 
and flit 

Past night's narrowing frontier; temple lanterns, cres- 
sets high 

Greece and Venice and Japan gave the globe to worship 
by, 

Gave the tribes of men that marching like the lights, 
must live and die? 



There were beacons on the hills, there were burning spires 

and towers. 
Light went leaping round the world and blossomed forth 

in flaming flowers, 
Till the ages dark were ended. Candles guttered. Oil 

they drew 
From the veins of earth, new gases flickered, flags of 

flame for you. 
Leading science; searching, finding larger lights and 

clearer, too. 

Out of air and out of ether, came new tremblings through 

the night. 
Man that takes the pulse of life, has found her fevered, 

sweating light; 

204 



THE LINESMAN 205 

Curried her with brazen brushes, spurred her on with 

spikes of fire; 
Furnaces and dynamos he trained and tuned ; now to their 

choir 
Rivers harnessed to his service bring new notes of man's 
desire. 



So the lights march on. I see them in the jungles, in the 
mirk ; 

Lurking shadows flee before them, in the slums where 
men must work, 

In steel caisson-coffins dying; in the mines that keep you 
warm ; 

Finding power, that seaborne marches faster still through 
fog and storm. 

Swarms of light, new regiments of life I lead; from mid- 
night form. 

Through your mist filled mills I send them, where wet 

cotton lint like snow 
Covers children, coughing, falling, ulcered lives too sick 

to grow. 
There I show you sin and shame. My searchlight fingers 

I display. 
Shifting, feeling past all perils. I make midnight bright 

as day. 



2o6 THE LINESMAN 

Where your cities focus life that festers, I make white its 
way. 

Now new stars and constellations through your streets 

and meadows shine. 
Past your footlights I lead joy. Laboratory, school and 

shrine, 
I have sentineled; your surgeons reinforced. Where 

mothers see 
Lives that leap to light from midnight, I have tolled to 

set you free — 
I, the midwife of your spirits, bring to light your years to 

be. 

Peconicj 6-2/— i/f 



THE ACCOUNTANT 

HERE is eternity today, God's body broken to your 
hands. 
You let it slip and fall away or mold it to your soul's de- 
mands. 
All things must pass, the current flows. Your vortex 

ring of will as well 
A zero or one unit shows in man's account of heaven and 
hell. 



Not to be nothing — I am one of millions toiling in the 

dark 
For wages bare from sun to sun, who see far lights of life, 

and mark 
Some muflled thunder of applause when man the master 

conquers time. 
Out of new matter forges laws that force a million souls 

to climb. 
God sends new Prophets in our day. Darwin and Wal- 
lace pioneered 
For Spencer and the rest the way, till a new heaven and 

earth appeared. 
Crooks, Haeckel, Curie, Edison, Marconi, Metchnikoff, 

Carrel, 
Pasteur and Erlich, all have won for men new issues forth 

from hell: 
Hell that is waste in rotting flesh, in ulcered streets and 

and souls as well. 

207 



2o8 THE ACCOUNTANT 

God writes new scriptures hour by hour. Of all His 

scribes I am the least. 
I list men's lusts, their greed for power in ledgers black. 

Where soul and beast 
Wrestle and writhe and rise and fall, I chart a nation's 

fever curve. 
I cast its belance. Least of all thy scribes of truth: I 

also serve. 



Had I the power of Parkman blind, but regent of his life- 
time, then: 

The awful annals of the mind, this sudden rush of 
thought to men, 

I should set forth in order, show how doubt and dogma 
still go back. 

New searchlights through mean streets would throw, 
through each soul alley, foul and black. 

New antiseptics of the brain announce, in tense detail 
relate 

How Christ has come to earth again, how God is man 
and masters fate. 

Today flames forth a new crusade, the last the sternest 

creed of all. 
For man the ape by ages made mounts to the stars, 

though churches fall. 



THE ACCOUNTANT 209 

He spreads his wings; his airships soar. New tremblings 

through the ether thrill, 
New messengers of fire adore his more immune, immortal 

will. 
One letter of that Gospel learned, one text of freedom 

to proclaim. 
With loftier faith than e'er discerned the martyr's eye: 

I suffer shame, 
I gave my body to be burned, I send my soul to feed the 

flame. 

S.S.Dunbea, 2-10-14 



MOVIES 

BROADWAY'S one big moving picture. Where I 
sit I see it plain, 
Typing letters by my window while they come and go 

again, 
People passing, millions, always, until midnight shifts the 

reels. 
There are days I see it, hear it, seem to know just how it 
feels. 



There are days life seems so near that I could touch it in 

the street, 
Kiss them all, both men and women, bring their wasted 

lives to meet. 
There are days they glide like shadows through the mist 

with muffled tread. 
And my soul goes out to seize them through the air that 

drags like lead. 

They go silently like shadows through the shadow cold 
and gray. 

Color stolen from their faces, thought and purpose drained 
away 

Faster still to feed the lights that flame forever for suc- 
cess. 

Moving shadow-shapes of pain and toil that fails in loneli- 
ness. 

210 



MOVIES 211 

Shadow pictures, bloodless, lifeless. Yet we watch them 

though we know 
Life is on the hills, the ocean, in green woods where all 

things grow. 
Shadow shapes as gray and grimy as the parts of time's 

machine, 
Grinding life across the city with gray daylight for a 

screen. 

Over there is life, but here our life persists and tone- 

lessly 
Struggles on between the seats where millions more like 

me may see. 
Millions more like me, all marching toward tomorrow 

past today. 
We can see the frauds, the failures, see weak faces on their 

way. 

Cold and gray they move forever. They are marching past 

despair. 
Past defeat, to better things, to larger light, to clearer 

air. 
On the altar of tomorrow casting all, till time reveals 
Ail we doubted, feared, despairing of the ending of the 

reels. 



212 MOVIES 

\Vc have made the pictures move and mirror life that wins 

at last, 
Records new to stir tomorrow, purpose new that brings the 

past 
Back to make the people live, the blind to see, my brain to 

know 
How my fingers hammering each key have helped today 

to grow. 

New York, 6-22-14 



THE PIT 

I WENT sinking from the sunlight and the faces of 
my friends, 
Till at last the}^ never knew me. I went sinking deeper 

yet; 
Drinking death by inches warm, and wet, and fighting to 

forget ; 
Killing longing, killing thinking, into night that never 
ends. 



One warm wave reached up and splashed me, smeared my 

footing where I stood, 
Where the city's cliifs and ledges built frail bridges o'er 

the pit ; 
Sieve on sieve that lets you through or lets you cling. 

Last night I could 
Scent salvation in the spring, and feel that I still was heir 

to it. 

One warm wave reached up and swept me where God 

lets His gutters reek, 
Where lost women sob at midnight, shriek and shudder; 

till I stood 
Where the pressure of the millions crushes down the sick 

and weak, 
Every will life wastes still, slowly to the slime's last 

brotherhood. 

213 



214 THE PIT 

I ate garbage in the gutters. I lay noisome in the sun. 

Scrubbed spittoons for drink to drug me, stole from chil- 
dren and the blind, 

Wrote love letters for a harlot, shared her wages: one by 
one 

Learned each secret shame that festers in the flesh of 
humankind. 

Something saved me: for the pit has tides that rise and 

fall and rise. 
I woke up one morning early, heard the trolleys clank 

and jar. 
Through their sound a woman sang a song I knew. I 

raised my eyes, 
From a pier head saw the sunrise: knew each cinder hides 

a star. 



On the street I found a friend. I turned from him, then 
took his hand. 

Took his clothes, his food, his faith ; let him find me work 
to do ; 

Found that I had not forgotten how to love. I under- 
stand 

Why the pit for man's salvation must persist the ages 
through. 



THE PIT 215 

There man tries the strength of love. God Almighty's 

mercy knows. 
We can never love the happy in our happiness as well 
As the soul that still must suffer, lavishing all life it 

owes 
On the human hands and hearts whose loving lifts the lost 

from hell. 

Peconic, /'-^0-i4 



MOODS 



KINSHIP AT DAVOS 

I RODE through the rain on m}' vvaj^ that day; 
(Thirty miles pedalled through drizzle and mud) 
Till I took the train. And I thirsted for blood. 
And I couldn't hear all that the mountains say — 
" If you can't be as big and as high as we are 
Be as big as you can." And I looked from the car 
At the flanks of the hills like two walls that were green 
And the torrents that tore the gray boulders between. 
And they sang as they flowed, '' We must fall who were 

free, 
There are rocks in our road. But we run to the sea." 

And the steam of the train as it writhed and it hissed 
Like a snake as it mounted, was lost in the mist ; 
Till only the pine tops stood clear of the gray 
Like souls that have sunk to their shoulders in clay. 
Then over the summit we slithered at last. 
With the wheels rolling faster. The mists breaking fast 
Watched a world that to wonder and terror awoke, 
And into decision's gray valley we broke. 

Then I came to a kurhaus and cursed at the rain. 
Till I looked at the souls that lay languid in pain. 
And one of them rose looking ruddy and strong. 
Now he hails me in English — Tonight we belong 
To the kinship of blood and of brains and of heart,^ 
That can make of life's moments an altar and art. 

219 



220 KINSHIP AT DAVOS 

He was human that Hollander. Things that he told 
They shall glow in my mind when the world has grown 

old. 
And he laughed at my stories with death in his face. 
There were books we both loved. Oh! the grayest dis- 
grace 
Is to go through one's life like a stock or a stone, 
And to suffer, and stumble, and struggle alone. 

Davos, y-so-i2 



A REST 

LAST night I dreamed of you. I had not seen you 
Or heard from you for weeks. I tried to pass 
What once was wonder's door. You came and called 

me. 
There was Ruth's message, better said than written. 
And so I stood; found in your fire once more the last of 
earth's enigmas. 

You had a concert later, yet you let me stay. 

Tomorrow was Aida. I might take you. 

So for an hour we sat where I could see you 

Between the twilight and the boulevard, 

That blazed below with lights like golden days 

In life's long darkness, with thin pools of rain 

Like stormy memories that mirrored — nothing much. 

Little you said. Your words were like the notes 

Of chords that silence long alone completes. 

And I said less. Yet for a space our spirits hand in hand 

Wondered at all the hours we men and women waste 

In noise and restlessness. I seemed to hear 

The tuning up of life's last orchestra. 

We for a moment struck the pitch together there. 

I know that stronger, surer hands than ours 
Must set the score and hold the leader's baton : 



222 A REST 

That never once again in unison we might sound strings 

that snap, 
Life and the tempered tolerance of time, 
That life interprets to its worshipers. 

You w^ere too tense too often. But last night 

You rested as your hands rest on a note 

Stretched like a golden wire that binds our hearts 

To the hereafter and the past together. Nothing more 

I wanted then: until I woke to face 

This world that out of heartbreak wins today. 

Los Angeles, 11-2^-13 



w 



FLOOD TIDE 

'HEN things are running crossvvays till each nerve 
cries out in pain, 
When a thousand clanging hammers of the street beat in 

my brain, 
There comes a day when I drift away to an island of re- 
pose, 
And I lie in my swaying hammock where the gray tide 
water flows. 

I lie in my hammock on the porch till the grayness turns 

to blue 
And the morning lifts the mist that shifts to make day 

fit for you, 
And the tide comes creeping landward as the sun comes 

climbing high, 
And the little winds of the morning go rippling through 

the sky. 

And the little waves on the beaches thrill where the 

grasses nod and dip. 
And earth and sea are lovers, and lip comes home to lip. 
And your voice is softly singing through long lessons of 

delight. 
And the birds are winging round the flame unseen, serene 

and white; 



223 



224 FLOOD TIDE 

High on 5'oiir hearth's bare altar, in the shadows where I 
see 

A form that flits by a window where life smiles back at 
me. 

Then I know why the Lord of our breathlessness, our 
haste, our waste and fret, 

Can lift us up on His tides of light for a season, to for- 
get; 

The sunken reefs of our cities, and the wrecks that drift 

and sink, 
Flotsam of fears and prayers and tears and torments; and 

I think 
That we live in a tideless ocean, till a tide that rises high 
Shall lift us up past moon and stars' white tide marks in 

the sky, 
Till the last lost shipwrecked life on earth has grown too 

great to die. 

River head, y-g-14 



PLEIN AIR 

I SIT in the open country beneath my apple trees, 
And the winds walk up to talk with me. There all 
the sky one sees, 

And my heart's for the far horizons and the little creeping 
things ; 

A bird in the grass, and a flower in the field. A grub un- 
folds its wings. 

And my fancy flits and soars with him and sings where 
rivers run, 

Out in the open country I go swimming in the sun. 

And a motor hoots down the highway, and my thoughts 

go travelling back 
To the city's crowded prison cells where life lies on the 

rack ; 
To the streets that they smear with shadows till the 

strongest slip and fall. 
Out in the open country there is life and light for all. 
And the sky is a high cathedral where all the nights and 

days 
They kindle lights of worship; and life is prayer and 

praise. 

A ploughman rounds his furrows in rituals as old 

As the incense he sets free for me. A painter gets his 

gold 
From buttercups in the meadow and sunlij^ht on the brook. 

225 



226 PLEIN AIR 

A bee goes stealing honey where I begin my book. 
And nine little yellow goslings go down the sea to seek, 
And the life that lives in the marshes. A boat beats up 
the creek. 

A baby beats on a window. And I think of the souls that 

crawl 
Past counters heaped with human hearts, from office wall 

to wall. 
Where the tickers time the tiring hearts of greed and a 

gray desire. 
Out in the open country today is a golden fire. 
And the sun mounts up to midday till all the air is light. 
And the clouds are the breath of God Himself who gives 

us day and night. 

He is here in the air around us. And His words are the 

winds of May. 
He is there in the hearts that hold Him fast and take 

Him home today. 
Where babes are burned to Moloch, and offered blindly 

there 
To the greed and grime of millions, in the horror and 

despair, 
Where a baby beats at a window, two pennies clutching 

tight. 
Till life, the mother, takes today and lifts it up to light. 
Peconicj ^-28-14 



SATURDAY'S TRAIN 

SATURDAY'S train is always late. We stand on a 
plaform of splintered planks, 
Until New York for a marvelous minute into our cosmos 

slides and clanks. 
The mail bag falls, trunks hit the floor, and people in 

turn on the steps appear; 
Portraits framed in a vestibule door, with their faces smil- 
ing and flushed and dear. 

And the girls on the platform chatter and kiss and hug as 
they hang on each other's necks, 

And we hustle them off to our motors and rigs, and we 
grab their bags and their coats and checks. 

And the motors and rigs are standing in ranks around the 
door of a corner store. 

And one of us waits outside for the mail where the farm- 
ers tramp like the train on the floor. 

And we get our letters and look at the news, and we pay 

for peaches and cigarettes. 
Oars and raisins, and tennis shoes, and talcum powder and 

landing nets. 
And we gossip and race to the cross roads. Then, one 

after another we glide away 
Down our own little lane in the heart of the woods that 

leads to light by the side of the bay. 
227 



228 SATURDAY'S TRAIN 

In mid-Manhattan in mid- July from my office window I 

gaze afar 
Past the haze of heat and the smoking roofs to the shallows 

cool where our beaches are. 
And I see the faces of people that paint, people that write, 

and the rest that wait 
On a splintered platform, week after week, for a Saturday 

train that is sure to be late. 



Henry and Edith, Helen and Charles, and a score besides 

through the heat rays swim: 
And the children, Isabelle, Betty and Jack, Richard and 

Caroline, Babs and Bim. 
And I want to get back to the paths they tread, to the 

flowers they find, to the wind in the trees, 
And the sailing dories and motor boats, and the sound and 

the sweep and the color of seas. 



There's a weed in a crack in the bathhouse floor. There's 

a window low where I watch the moon. 
Thei^e's a curve in the creek where the fireflies flash. 

There are stars in the trees, I shall see them soon. 
And the old gray station's an altar of life, and its pilgrim 

armies each Sabbath ascend 
To the worship of winds in the open air, and the shrines 

in your soul where you find your friend. 



SATURDAY'S TRAIN 229 

There's maybe a heaven hereafter, yes. But I guess that 

it never can be complete 
Without that station two rods or less from the end of the 

shadowy settlement street; 
Without the faces you're sweating to find at the end of a 

lifetime's working day, 
When your soul from its stupor, dumb and blind, leaps up 

like a boy's to its last long play. 
Heaven hereafter? Never you mind. Here's heaven 

enough for one week on the way. 

Pe conic, /-^/-/^ 



WELCOME 

THERE is a hillside garden that their tender hands 
have tended, 
Below a house that holds for me a shrine of joy and 

light. 
And there beneath a cloudless sun when June is warm 

and splendid 
I see them coming home to me, three girls in garments 
white. 

Alice with lilies in her hands, and little dark Dolores 
Showing her glowing marigolds ; and Iris last of all 
Under the arbor by the wall of purple morning glories ; 
Bringing my crimson ramblers back that sought to scale 
the wall. 

Alice with smiles along her lips ; Dolores still and tender ; 
Iris whose eyes can tell me more than tongue shall ever 

say; 
They offer to my open arms their bodies soft and slender, 
Bringing the best of summer here, their garlanded today. 

Into my study they have swept and brasses from Benares, 

Vases from Venice they have filled, and hung their wreaths 
around 

The portrait where their mother smiles like the tall tran- 
quil Maries 

That Perugino used to paint, with hair like sunlight 
crowned. 

230 



WELCOME 231 

** Mother Is coming home today." (The words them- 
selves are singing.) 
" How long it is," our litany, forgotten, they repeat. 
Making their last response to love, their last oblation 

bringing, 
Till at the hour of evensong, their voices still more sweet, 
Tremble and sanctify the house where happy hearts shall 
meet. 

Yokohama, 12-2^-1^ 



CHILDREN 

YOU cannot see the children, 5^ou have hidden them 
away. 
In the shadows, in the streets of shame, of souls too tired 

to play, 
Of lives too sad to smile at light, that never see the sun ; 
Toiling on to meet the midnight till the day's long task 

is done; 
Toiling, choking in your sweatshops. These you mur- 
dered one by one. 

You cannot hear the children. In the noises of your 
streets 

You have drowned each sigh of pleasure, dulled each 
heart that leaps, that beats, 

Like hillside brooks your greed makes sluggish, stagnant. 
You have choked their cries. 

Cries of rapture, slowly ceasing, till tonight's last lulla- 
bies 

Through your riot sound like dirges, where love watches 
love that dies. 

You cannot feel the children. Kisses sweet as birds at 

dawn. 
Fail where wailing, faint and fretful, souls that smiled 

have starved and gone. 
All their little least caresses, you have thwarted, thrust 

aside; 

232 



CHILDREN 233 

Every drowsy head that presses closer home at even tide; 
Every kiss that lingers, blesses, you have lost in greed and 
pride. 



You cannot love the children that you lose and leave 
alone ; 

Lives unborn and warped and wasted, while your hearts 
are turned to stone, 

In your mills by millions murdered. Like the flow^ers you 
starved and smeared 

In lost gardens of your cities; till a shadow black ap- 
peared 

Of their anguish, dumb and dreadful, near success by 
slaves revered. 



You cannot save the children till you learn yourself to 

save, 
Ano the burden of their ruin you must carry to the 

grave ; 
Growing cruel, tame and tearless, flesh and spirit frail as 

well; 
Butchered by machines by millions, you have left them 

there in hell; 
Till their ruin's black infection taints the thing you buy 

and sell. 



234 CHILDREN 

But you cannot check the children. Life is stronger than 
your sins, 

Than your bitterness and blindness; and a fairer day be- 
gins. 

They are stirring, they are waking. Out of mill and 
mine and slum, 

Like sap in spring, like light at dawn, like life at birth they 
come ; 

And their cry becomes a gospel, life's last word on lips 
long dumb. 

Peconic, 6-11-14 



BED RIDDEN 

I WAS a child. I lay in bed. 
They put a bandage round my head 
And doctors came and looked at me. 
I was as sick as I could be, 
And I could hardly smile or see. 

But sometimes that the sky was blue 
I knew. When most I longed for you 
I heard you singing soft and low 
The songs that mothers always know, 
And then the pain would seem to go. 

And sometimes when I waked at night, 
When all was dark, a single light 
Would show you sitting by my side 
And " Mother, Mother dear! " I cried. 
And you were near until you died. 

I was a child. I lay abed. 
God put' His pressure on my head. 
He sent His pain to question me 
When all the world was mine to see 
And I was sad as I could be. 

I was alone. I longed for you. 
And sometimes when the sky is blue 
I seem to see you, seem to know 
235 



236 BED RIDDEN 

Your voice forever sweet and low, 
And dream that 3'ou can never go. 

And sometimes when the stars at night 
Sprinkle that river black with light 
Like stepping stones that cross the sky; 
I go to meet you, dear. And I 
Know you are near, until I die. 

Peconic, 6-5-14 



PLAY RITUAL 

UNDER the trees of the orchard's gray columns and 
cloisters, upholding 

Courts of the temple of living, the world has forgotten 
today. 

Bulwarked by bastions of green the true treasures of ages 
unfolding, 

Safe in the shade of a hedge, her children I hear at their 
play; 

And I sit by my window and watch and I listen, a life- 
time away. 

Here is a carbon of Pallas. And yonder, Ulysses, her 

chosen 
Creeps through his palace at night with Argos the hound 

at his heels, 
With him Eumaeus, the swineherd, the son of my cook. 

Fear has frozen 
The suitors, Penelope's dolls. The bow twangs. The 

last of them reels. 
And the queen at the sight of the slain a rage unrecorded 

reveals. 



She is pacified fully with gifts. Brother's coat is a carpet 

that flying 
Has haled them in haste to the East where Golconda is 

grown on the trees. 

237 



238 PLAY RITUAL 

And topaz and rubies they rain on her lap. Every skeptic 
belying 

The story of Eden they act, in costume convention de- 
crees 

With a snake that I gave them last May, made of rubber 
that squirms when you squeeze. 

They are Argonauts bound for the ports where Medea 
mandagora mixes 

In a smudge that mosquitoes abhor (I can smell the stray 
fumes of it here). 

And Aladdin, before they are lost, and the Jinn of the 
bottle. She fixes 

Her hair with the comb of the Lorelei. They are every- 
thing living and dear 

That the poets and children of time must remember 
while year follows year. 

And her soul is the soul of the wind that my baby's 

bright tresses caresses. 
And she kisses the lips of her son as they stiffen and 

sternly command. 
And her life is the life of the earth that inch of their 

loveliness presses 
As they throw themselves down in the shadows too tired 

and too sleepy to stand. 



PLAY RITUAL 239 

And she calls, and they smile and they see her, in dreams 
of the heart's shadowland. 

There the spirits of mothers that played with their babies 

forever are tender. 
And the little flushed cheeks in the summer they cool. 

And they smile with the spring. 
But saddest and sweetest of all they call through the 

autumn's wild splendor 
When our gifts to her altar of light with the months 

and the minutes we bring; 
All that playtime and sorrow have sealed to the service 

of life that is king. 

S.S. Awa Maru 11-28- 13 



MACHINE MADE 

WIRES and rails and paving stones, bricks and 
mortar, plaster, glass: 
We have made a world of them. We have done with 

trees and grass, 
Flowers and sunrise and delight, seas and stars and 

mountain tops. 
We wind on from day to night, through this treadmill 
till one drops. 



We walk other people's ways, trodden hard and hard 

to tread. 
We live other people's days, crowded, airless, chill and 

dead. 
We hear other people's noise, numbing nerves and heart 

and mind; 
Envy other people's joys, unexpected, unresigned : 

Stare at other people's clothes, furs and feathers, silk 
and lace; 

See what other people see, in each blank, machine-made 
face, 

Painted, powdered, newly gilt, tailor's dummies for the 
rest: 

Watching other's roses wilt, by their passion mad pos- 
sessed : 



240 



MACHINE MADE 241 

Once a month, or once a year, In some supper room at 

night, 
Wasting other people's cheer, stealing other people's light. 
Turning life to foaming wine and empty bottles. We 

awake. 
Reading other people's lies, up to town our task we 

take. 

All the old machine-made things we who nothing new 

devise 
Do. The soul in us that sings, sighs and sickens, droops 

and dies. 
Other people's lusts we live, printed, bound, at second 

hand. 
Other people's sins forgive, who their slaves of habit 

stand. 

Murders, treasons, tyrannies, maimings, bllndings, brand- 
ing, all; 

In our cheap machine-made ease; all things petty, tame 
and small 

Manufactured for today, by the million; we retail, 

Advertise and toss away In a world for rent or sale. 

Other people's souls we sell, buy or barter for our own. 
Other people's heaven or hell, doubt or dig. All life 
alone, 



242 MACHINE MADE 

Out of other people's sight, like our youth long since 

gone by: 
Other people's day and night we are drugged with till 

we die. 
New York, 7-^7-H 



THINGS 



THE EARTH MAN 

AFTER A STATUE BY LOUIS POTTER 

WISTFUL, blind, brooding, silent, he stands; 
All the long strength of earth creeping to 
light, 
Holding its substance in huge, heavy hands, 
Groping a path to the portals of sight. 

Earth that is slow in him fetters his feet. 
Rooted in soil like the life of the trees. 
Brother of mountains, inert, incomplete. 
Fitted to struggle and grow by degrees; 

He is the past that to rise is compelled. 
Pressure of glaciers and lava's slow flow; 
Brain of the brute from black caverns expelled 
Into the open, its Maker to know. 

He is five fingers that stretch till they touch. 
He is a horror that shudders and hides. 
He is a need that must grapple and clutch. 
Vital and sure as the turn of the tides. 

Sounds beat like hammers, and batter his ears; 
Surf in its rages, and rivers that run. 
Roaring of beasts; till above them he hears 
The song of a bird like the soul of the sun: 
245 



246 THE EARTH MAN 

Something that urges him up and afar, 
Summons his spirit to lust and to hate, 
Lunge through the shadows to capture a star. 
Hunt till he holds her, his woman and mate. 

He is alone though his heart knows it not. 
Bound by blind hunger of belly and nerves,* 
Child of the ages that blackness begot; 
He is Tomorrow whose Master he serves. 

New York, 1-26-12 



AURORA 

AFTER A STATUE BY LOUIS POTTER 

SHE is the sunrise of the waking earth, 
Naked and perfect as a perfect flower, 
Fearless and poised to meet the light's embrace. 
For in her eyes a soul has come to birth 
Fresh from its sleep and fragrant, every hour 
Of love's delights fore-shadowed in her face. 

She is the essence of all loveliness. 
Of every spring time. Every flower and fruit 
That grew before her gladly to the light 
Made her immortal. Terror and distress 
Toiled in the blackness to transmute the brute, 
To make her beauty wonderful and white. 

She is the moon's last beam, the gleam of dew 
That mirrors dawn while shadows shroud the grass, 
The rose of fire that reddens winter's rime; 
Radiance of sunsets and of rainbows too, 
Of all things perfect that appear and pass, 
Transient and deathless till the end of time. 

In her all river currents harmonize 
With rippling pools that eddy round her breasts. 
And winds that whisper trembling through her hair. 
And the long lines from shoulders through to thighs 

247 



248 AURORA 

Break as the waves break. Into curving crests 
Around her rise caressing tides of air. 

She is a symphony, the sum of joy 
Shaped in one body for the world to see, 
To learn from her forever to rejoice. 
She is the smile no sorrow can destroy 
Warm on the lips of all humanity 
Waiting to hear the wonder of her voice. 

New York, i-2g-i2 



THE GOLDEN GIRL 

AFTER A STATUE BY RUDOLPH EVANS 

FIVE thousand years of sculpture fashioned her; 
Consummate, simple, modern and as old 
As Myron's bronzes. All her flesh is gold. 
She seems to hear her sisters' footsteps stir. 

Shy dryads gaze at her from old gray trees; 
Truth in one girl, eternal as today; 
One man's pure passion that transfused her clay, 
Turned her to bronze to stand through centuries. 

She bathes in living sunlight all day long. 
She feels the wonder of the world. She knows 
The mysteries of sunsets and of snows. 
She hears the rapture of the river's song. 

Around her linger long all tender things; 
The clouds' slow shadows falling at her feet, 
The level rays of dawn, the summons sweet 
Of every winged soul that soars and sings. 

She listens still until her pilgrims come. 
Children shall smile to see her loveliness; 
And mothers meeting her that hour shall bless. 
Poets shall praise her out of lips long dumb. 

249 



250 THE GOLDEN GIRL 

For she is beauty, born today to be 
The human sister of the stars and snows, 
The soul of love that smoulders in the rose 
That one man felt, and gave to all to see. 

Parts, 4-1-14 ' 



THE GARGOYLES 

THEY made a house for holiness, they raised a 
spire for prayer, 
With beasts of the Apocalypse around it in the air. 
The beasts of the Evangelist, man, eagle, lion and ox, 
They carved upon their pinnacles as nature carved her 

rocks 
With fire and frost. And heat and cold, their substance 
slowly wear. 

The rains are raised to ravage them. The fingers of the 

storm 
Have felt their flesh and found it firm. When all the 

world is warm, 
When summer swelters, Paris pants, the Seine is small 

and old; 
The fiends rip thunder from the air, and sudden shafts 

of cold. 
Like wasps that stab the firmament, the yellow lightnings 

swarm. 

The floods are loosed, the thunder rolls, the gutters choke 

below ; 
Above, about the pinnacles, the gusts begin to blow. 
The arrows of the storm have reached the steep cathedral 

roof. 
The devils dance. They tread the tiles. They put them 

to the proof, 

251 



252 THE GARGOYLES 

Till the tall columns of the nave shall tremble where 
they go. 

And then the gargoyles gurgle loud, through throats that 

long were dry. 
Through the hot Tophet of the time that flamed to full 

July. 

They saw the sun that filled the sky, that flared high 

overhead. 
Below they saw the asphalt ooze. They smelt the fumes 

of lead. 
The wind became a blowpipe flame that blustered through 

the sky. 

The fiends that perched laid hold on them. And now 
the dryness drains 

The water from the living rock, slow drops from granite 
veins, 

Till in a thousand thunder claps the airs of heaven ex- 
plode ; 

Till the gargoyles glut with gladness like the gutters in 
the road. 

And they swim with life that, laughing, takes its pleasure 
for its pains. 

The beasts of the Apocalypse, both blessed and accursed. 
Range round the spire of Notre Dame. The winged 
man stands first. 



THE GARGOYLES 253 

The eagle, ox and lion there processionals begin; 
The pelican for charity, the basilisk for sin. 
But oldest and most grim of all, the gargoyles gray are 
thirst. 

Paris, 5-1-^3 



THE STONE PILE 

WE had once seen it on a road to France ; 
Man barely more than cave man hammering 
Breaking his stones to fit his iron ring: 
Deaf to all sounds, to all the winds that sing; 
Beating the time for manhood's slow advance: 

Making his stone pile. Vermin breeding there 
Festered and rotted, dying in the dark. 
He never knew them, striking spark on spark, 
Lost seeds of light. He never paused to hark 
To man's new motors drumming through the air. 

But once a woman singing went her way. 
Singing of loves and lullabies to be. 
He heard her carelessly. He seemed to see 
Things that belonged to lives more large and free. 
And then his smile was like the last of day. 

We have made stone piles in our prison walls. 
We have made stone piles in our city streets 
Where life that breeds and festers, life defeats, 
Where the dull heart of labor blindly beats. 
Deaf to the winds and all the world that calls: 

Piling our cities; to an iron ring. 
Fitting the stuff that binds our road today 
Lost to the open, vistas far away, 

254 



THE STONE PILE 255 

Valiant adventures, prayers that lovers say, 
Seeing one woman singing in the spring: 

Piling our cities; manhood far and near 
Shaping the stones that larger lives shall tread 
Beside the road where men that march ahead 
Call us in vain, who die among the dead 
Till life, our love at last stands singing here. 

New York, -6-24-14 



FLEET MANCEUFRES 

THEY keep their intervals as true as seasoned 
athletes of a team, 
Trained to the minute. Lean and grim and gray they 

glide in line ahead. 
A white wave welters at each bow. And all is stirless 

overhead 
Save trails of smoke that from three tall gray funnels fall 
and landward stream. 



Like runners breathing tensely through October's stirring 

air they go. 
They are as vital and alive; and like the winds they seem 

to wake, 
As packed with power that must explode; as imminent as 

waves that break. 
And shadows long float on before their long and strong 

and level row. 



Essential, cosmic, wonderful, in strange new beauty fit 

to serve 
An iron purpose slowly spelled, a living sentence of the 

law, 
That wakes the lightnings and the stars; and sterner 

tensions slowly draw 
Through the vast void of sound and sense, and tighten 

every tingling nerve. 

256 



FLEET MANCEVVRES 257 

Man's old dominion over fire, his truceless conquest of the 
cold, 

His mastery of storms and tides, his perils long in chart- 
less seas; 

His midnight battles with the brute, his wars of all the 
centuries, 

Their shifting turrets still conceal, their lips of steel in 
silence hold. 



All speaks in thunder when at last the flagship's salvos 

shake the air. 
Precise and searching, shot on shot, the target strikes. 

Her soul set free 
Like heroes' hearts in battle born, by smoke wreaths haloed 

splendidly 
Drifts down the line as ship on ship to God begins its 

iron prayer. 

Ship after ship makes offering of discipline and fitness 

trained 
To peril's service; ship on ship thunders the law that all 

obey 
In war and peace, whose God is strength and larger 

wisdom day by day. 
Ship after ship in silence goes to goals that yesterday 

ordained. 



258 FLEET MANCEUFRES 

'IVelve steel cathedrals of todaj^ sail trailing incense 

silently 
Into the west's horizon red, to sentinel a nation's sleep ; 
Twelve monasteries stern of men that vigils through the 

midnight keep; 
For God, whose cities shame the land, still saves His 

servants on the sea. 

Peconicj '/-I2-I^ 



GLOUCESTER SCHOONERS 

THEY come shining through the morning like a 
troop of laughing girls. 
Under each soaring forefoot the flashing water curls. 
They have slipped before the sunrise from the shadow- 
lands of night, 
And the east is red behind them, and their sails are rose 
and white. 



They come from the Banks and the breakers and the 

meshes blind of mist, 
Where mermaids in the midnight the sailor's lips have 

kissed 
Asleep in his drifting dory. And white hands drag him 

down. 
With snows that smooth the surges, and the dreams of 

men they drown. 

They come with a toll and a tribute that men from ocean 

take 
With the roll of wrecks in winter, and women's hearts 

that break 
When they wake in the wild northeasters, and hear on 

their Gloucester shore 
The roar of the surf that beaches the bergs on Labrador. 

They come from the wild sea witches who mortal w^omen 
hate, 

259 



26o GLOUCESTER SCHOONERS 

Who troll the shores for their fishing with the sea bass 

for their bait. 
Out of the deep to the shallows, where stirless water 

hides 
Rocks that are hooks for their hunger, and the torments 

white of tides. 

They come with the blood of the Vikings, boys that have 

grown through gales. 
Where death on the crest of the breakers poises his weighted 

scales. 
Men who have wrought with the east wind, as a fish is 

hooked and played. 
And danced at the dawn with danger and wooed her like 

a maid. 

They come on the wrings of the morning like a flock of 
homing birds. 

And hearts go out to meet them, and prayers and whispered 
words. 

They come like a choir. And their singing and the twang- 
ing of their stays. 

Is a lied of the Lord of landfalls, and of storms, and 
nights and days. 

Los Angeles, 11-12-IJ 



THE ROAD 

GOD who made the mountains and a wall to call us 
up to Him, made the passes over them and 

choked their gates with snow, 
Made His storm winds winnow forth the strong and sure 

of heart of us, made the cold of starless skies to 

sift the weak below. 
Then He sent His rivers forth to pioneer a breach for 

us. Then He made the trees that should give men 

fire and heat. 
Larches, firs and pines, marching up to meet the avalanche, 

to wrestle with the storm winds, and with winter's 

white defeat : 
In their shade by millions made His blossoms, small and 

sweet. 

Climbing through the passes come the creatures that pass 

over them, mountain goats and mountain sheep and 

mountain cattle lean. 
Mountain lions, gray ghosts of hunger, stalking stealthily. 

So they trod their trails all the vales of earth 

between. 
So they crossed the glaciers to the summons of the years 

to be, apes that shedding hair their life's restless 

road surveyed. 
Running east and west, from the northern to the southern 

sea, following the air lanes that the birds of passage 

made, 

261 



262 THE ROAD 

Chased by gulls from rookeries and crags by breakers 
sprayed. 

All the ships that sail the sea were launched to serve this 

road of ours. Rome was built to build it and to 

pave its ruts with stone. 
All the tribes that triumphed bore their spoils to swell 

this load of ours. All the slaves of failure fell 

and died in dust alone. 
Dust and rain were turned to mud, that stopped the cracks 

and chinks of it; so the road was wrested from the 

wastage of defeat. 
Dust that red with running blood that renews the earth 

that drinks of it. And the tribes began to battle 

on, once more the light to meet. 
Toward the morning, toward the summit, toward the 

snow peaks; from the street. 

Carthage, Tyre and Sidon gave their gold to gain its 

maintainance; Greece made fair its reaches with 

her shrines beside the way. 
White between the olives, till the cross was planted over 

it, standing at each cross road of the soul that 

strives with clay. 
Saracens, Crusaders came and struggled up each mile of 

it. War wins here its summit, there despair to 

ruin rolls. 



THE ROAD 263 

Conquerors of centuries grew weary for a while of it. 

Hannibal, Napoleon, and Caesar paid their tolls, 
To this road that takes our time, and paves success with 

souls. 



Now at last an iron road goes over and goes under it. 

Men have tunnelled winter and the mountain's 

heart of stone. 
Nature stands half tamed today. Men learn to stab and 

sunder it. But the road still scales the summits 

where the strongest stand alone. 
Motor cars and dynamite may make their passing mock 

of it. The w^eak may seek their tunnels. But the 

mountains and the cold 
Lure men from the mob to learn the languor and the 

shock of it, to wrestle with the storm winds as our 

fathers fought of old. 
Till they tramp to the tall portals of the sunset's house 

of gold. 

Here we glimpse Valhalla, and the splendor and the sheen 

of it. And the zig-zags grow more steep. At last 

they leap from cloud to cloud. 
Here we hear Valkyries in the twilight. And the lean 

of it is our tent wall till tomorrow when the winds 

at dusk are bowed. 



264 THE ROAD 

Worshipping the stars above, our zig-zags to eternity, and 

men that out of ocean and its slime, inert and 

dumb, 
Out of night and ether blind, climbing, come their road to 

find. The dying lift the living, with their lips 

and fingers numb. 
Till death is but one milestone dark to wider worlds to 

come. 

Paris, 7-3-13 



THE OVERLAND TRAIL 

IT began In blood of Vikings, far beyond the 
Alleghenies. North and south along the shore line 
from the surges of the sea, 

Through the forests, past the mountains, rose the impulse 
of a nation. From the farms and from the cities 
strode its sons whose sires were free, 

Down the rivers running westward, poled their rafts be- 
yond the rapids. Out beyond the Mississippi 
prairie schooners setting sail. 

Seen like ships along the sky line, met the prairie fires and 
vanished in the floods of flame, that roaring, swept 
like rivers past the trail. 

But the tide of man was stronger. On they swept and 
passed the prairies, till their starving cattle, failing 
where the vultures fed, lay dead. 

Circling round them like the whirlwind, the Cheyennes 
and Comanches in red spirals of despair, rode on 
behind them and ahead. 

Day and night across the prairies, stakes of flame where 
men and women writhed in torment were their 
milestones. O'er the ashes of lost lives 

They wen^ on. And thirst and hunger rode beside them. 
Fear and fever were their children In the wagons 
where the smallpox slew their wives. 



265 



266 THE OVERLAND TRAIL 

They went on and found the foothills. Where the 
warders of the mountains raised their mile high wall 
before them, through the pass their column poured. 

And they rested by the wayside, where white torrents from 
the snow-fields foamed through shadows of the hill- 
sides, in green valleys, blossom floored. 

Here they halted for a heartbeat of the blood that bore 
them onward ; got their breath, their gear refitted ; 
grappled with the great divide. 

Where the storm winds and the lightnings lashed them 
back on crumbling ledges, where sheer cliffs that 
fell forever, walled them in on either side. 

They went on, and in the desert, death lay waiting, darkly 
shrouded in the sand storm. And he slew them 
by his poisoned water holes ; 

Lured them on with lost mirages. Stripped and maddened 
they lay dying where he branded them and seared 
them with the flame that flays men's souls: 

But the strongest struggled onward, over fields of rotting 
lava. Giant cacti rose before them like gray ten- 
tacles of death. 

They went on and slipped between them, woke once more 
and saw the mountains; where the trail led to the 
summit, gazed once more and gathered breath. 



THE OVERLAND TRAIL 267 

They were strong but time was stronger, and he wore 
them down by inches until winter filled the passes 
with his wild white ambuscades. 

Where the blizzard crested mountains, like a seething sea 
that freezing skyward whirls its spray, were reel- 
ing; in the welter, up the grades 

They went on on feet that freezing bled ; and breathlessly 
and falling, dying, with their broken bodies blazed 
the trail till others came. 

And their bones, as white as winter, bare and bleaching in 
the sunshine, lined the passes, when the summer 
swept the mountains like a flame. 

They marched on, beyond the mountains, coastward strid- 
ing o'er the ranges, till their leaders, in the sunlight, 
looking westward saw the sea : 

Till the blood that bore them forward, throbbing onward 
to the ocean, to the heartbeat of the breakers, 
labored on, from labor free: 

Till their strongest on the shore-line felt the trail that they 
had finished stretching from the far Atlantic with 
its chain of deathless days. 

Like a chain of living wampum, red with bloodshed, black 
with horror, gray with sorrow; in the struggles of 
their sons should live always. 



268 THE OVERLAND TRAIL 

This they wrought before the railroad, ere the wires were 
strung that whisper in the darkness through the 
desert: ere our trail of steel we laid. 

Like the heartstring of a nation, strong and deathless and 
enduring, something mightier than millions, in 
their day our fathers made. 

In this last great folk migration, westward still the millions 
striving follow where the old frontiersmen lit 
their fires and dreamed their dreams. 

And their spirits, past the prairies, marching on beyond the 
mountains, trace a trail that runs forever, while one 
lamp of freedom gleams. 

Los Angeles, iO-iy-13 



THE OLD HOUSE 

EARTH that loves you, all of you gave her bones to 
make me strong. 

Sweating, dust-white quarry men toiled through summer 
sunlight long. 

Masons made and rooted me to my hillside. Winter 
nights 

Storming legions loosed in vain. Spring brought April's 
shy delights. 

Lilacs blossomed in my shade. Autumn stored my cup- 
boards. So 

I your fort of life was made; I your school where love 
should grow. 

Birds have nested in my trees, summer trysting from the 

South, 
Till your fathers learned of life how to love, till heart 

and mouth 
Sang their silent ecstasies. Girls their garlands round my 

walls 
Round ancestral portraits hung, wreathed my mirrors; 

heard my calls. 
All your vigils lone I know. All your hopes and agonies, 
Every prayer and travail pang. I am heir to all of these. 

I have borne your children all, echoed laughter light, and 
tears. 

269 



270 THE OLD HOUSE 

Little feet along my shadowed corridors have crept through 

years ; 
Climbed my footworn steps. I sent all your strongest 

forth to fight ; 
Out of toil and banishment led them home through storm 

and night; 
Lent defeat a resting place ; saw the bearers of your dead ; 
Heard the troubled spirit pass shuddering where horror 

led. 

Spirit finger tips I felt tapping at a lighted window pane, 

When the year's last snow drifts melted ; through the rush 
of winter rain 

Watched my masters staggering, blinded by the fumes of 
sin 

Thresholds bare and cold defiling. Shrinking famine en- 
tered in, 

Where pale women whispering, watched my dying embers 
fall. 

I was hungry with their hearts. I have lived and loved it 
all. 

Frosts besieged me. One by one winds my outworks 

whipped away; 
Till you wandered round the world, came and claimed me 

yesterday ; 



THE OLD HOUSE 271 

Found my shrine of memories, dreamed of children kneel- 
ing where 

Moonlight trembling crept to them; made my grayest 
gardens fair; 
- Voice to dusty volumes gave, past my crumbling lintels 
stole ; 

Let new fire my hearthstones lave: to my body brought a 
soul. 

Shanghai, 1-14-14 



ENVOY 

WE are weak children of a larger day 
That just begins to dawn. How shall we serve, 
Strive to leave something when life ebbs aw^ay, 
Stronger than we were, where light's last reserve 
Struggles with midnight through each shaking nerve? 

How shall w^e bring one word that lifts the heart, 
Reveal one vision of a life divine 
Boundless as air we breathe, whose wasted art 
Plays with life's toys behind its battle line? 
How shall we sound here Heaven's countersign? 

We have not toiled to lay life's cornerstones, 
Fashioned of steel its bridges that shall last; 
Snatched life from death where the sick city groans. 
We have not sent life's summons speeding fast 
Through wires that thrill all seas and deserts past. 

We have not charted stars nor chained the storms; 
Sorted God's atoms for man's triumph new; 
Saw how salvation new in test tubes forms; 
Passed thought's vast armies through today's review^; 
Marshalled the leaders of that host for you. 

Yet this remains. We have not played with lies, 
Traded the truth, despaired nor doubted long; 
Feared lest man fail at last to scale the skies; 

272 



ENVOY 273 

Who dies today, tomorrow grows more strong, 
Out of all agonies of pain and wrong. 

We have known life and found her lovelier 
Than stars or roses, sunrise, tender eyes; 
Held in our heart the throbbing heart of her; 
Out of her storms and flames and battle cries. 
Caught one new note of truth that never dies. 

8-25-14 



C 82 89 




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